MEMBERS of a County Durham choir will soon be jetting off to spend Easter in Durham, North Carolina, performing before some of the biggest audiences they have ever faced.

Gainford choral society numbers has about 50 members, though not all are available for the ten-day trip.

Spokesman, Mr Neville Kirby, said: "Though calling ourselves the Gainford Singers during the visit, we have recruited singers from North Durham and Teesside, making us representative of the whole area."

The group will leave Darlington on Saturday, April 7. It is an exchange trip, following a visit by the Orange Grove Baptist gospel choir from Durham, North Carolina, to Durham in the summer of 1999.

The choir gave concerts at Durham Cathedral, Consett Methodist church and Gainford St Mary's, as well as singing at a Sunday morning service at St John's, Ingleton.

The visits have been organised through Durham town twinning and Durham NC sister city organisations.

GlaxoSmithKline, which has factories in Barnard Castle and North Carolina, has made a donation towards expenses and the American operation is helping publicise concerts at that end.

"We will not be performing any spiritual or barber shop music," said Mr Kirby. "That would be like taking coals to Newcastle."

One place the singers will perform is the Duke Memorial Methodist church, an 800-seat Gothic building with a three-manual Holtkamp organ. They will give a concert, with music by Mozart, Brahms and Bach as well as singing settings of early Methodist hymns that have a local connection. Mr Andrew Christer, a deputy organist at Durham Cathedral, is the accompanist and will play organ solos. The concert will also feature some North-East and Scottish folk music and be followed by a turkey supper.

Another concert will have a miscellaneous programme mainly for the residents of a large retirement complex.

During Easter weekend, the singers will be entertained by members of the Orange Grove Baptist Church who will show them some of the African-American sites in the area.

They will sing at the Easter Day service when the congregation usually numbers 800. It is planned to put the choirs together for two items - Mortcrist (known in English as When I Survey the Wondrous Cross) for mixed voices and Llanfair for male voices.

There will also be plenty of time to see the sights, including a tour of Washington, a trip to the Duke family homestead, a day in the Appalachian mountains and a visit to Bennett Place, the site of the final surrender between the north and south in the American civil war.

The last concert before returning to England is at the 2,000-seat White Rock Baptist church at Winston, Salem, where the Rev Martin Luther King preached one of his most famous sermons.

Before they leave for America, those singers who are part of Gainford choral society will perform Brahms' Requiem at Gainford church on Sunday, March 25, at 8pm. Sheila Dixo