Friends and Family Concert 23 June 2024

 

And didn’t we have fun.

“So we have an audience?”

We’re in the car park and it’s warm enough for us to get out of our cars and chat.

A few choir members and a few of our audience have arrived early because there was a little worry that the carnival at Prestwich might have held up the traffic. It didn’t. By 2.45 pm a solid choir and a very respectable audience have already assembled.

And there is plenty of cake. There is a mountain of cake. Making and eating cake is our second best activity after enjoying our singing.

This so reminds me of the Koffikonzerts I used to attend when we lived in Holland. You paid the price of a coffee and a slice of cake – usually apple cake in that case – and you got the coffee and cake as well as a very good concert.

So, £5.00 not bad for a brew, some cake and a concert?

The emphasis is on “friends and family” and it is all very relaxed.

We work through our repertoire which contains some old favourites like The Water is Wide, I Say a Little Prayer and Love is the Sweetest Thing. And there are also newer items such as Why Walk if You Can Fly, Make You Feel My love and O Earth Loving Mother. Of course we also think of nature with Cool Moon and Colours of the Wind.

Jeff tells our audience that we’re going to sing a couple of songs that might touch our troubled world.  “It probably won’t make any difference to what you hear on the news,” he says. “But we hope it will do something.” 

So, we also sing Deep Peace and Grant Us Peace. Both the door to the Studio and the outer door are open. Are these songs going out into the world? Will they make a difference?  

An hour slips by without us noticing.

Our audience is lovely. It’s good to chat to them afterwards. Some of us are curious about how much people might enjoy listening to a choir like ours. We enjoy singing and I do like watching and listening to other choirs but part of the enjoyment of that comes from knowing what the process is.

“You get better every time,” says one of our visitors.  We hope we do; it’s what we aim for.

Their daughter, one of our altos, rolls her eyes and says “They say that every time.”

“I think they mean it though,” I reply.

We are very pleased with the GoChurch studio as a place to rehearse and perform. It was such a fun concert.

And so what’s up next?

Buxton of course. Shall we see you there?    

 

Whip-cracking Away with Family and Friends 16 January 2016

So, what better to do on cold January evening than come along to our Friends and Family concert held at Brunswick Parish Church, which several choir members attend?  Oh, yes, the sleet began to fall just as we all set off but the church was warm and cosy and a friend or two or three or four came along. 

This is now the third Friends and Family concert we’ve offered.  Always free and always with cake. We’re torn. At Brunswick Parish Church, it's easier to stay longer, lots of room, but it will probably have to be a Saturday or Ordsall Hall, very Ordsall, rather romantic, we have to leave promptly and it can only hold a smaller audience but we can use it easily enough on a Tuesday.  Let us know what you think by adding a comment here.         

My goodness weren’t our top-up acts something?  Daisy, also one of our talented young sopranos but an established artist in her own right, offered two fabulous solos.  Ella presented some lesser-known Ralph McTell numbers. The Mad Donnas were as professional as ever. John (aka Elvis, Clint, Superman and many others) told his stories of RALPH and other dog-turd lifting machines.  (Yes, that’s right). Not to mention the whip-cracking cow-girl, Marilyn, who turned our musical director into a cowboy, our secretary into a show-girl and one unsuspecting bass – we think actually our chairman had been the target – into an Indian Chief.

We enjoyed singing and we think our audience enjoyed listening. Naturally we paraded the four – five songs we’re entering for the ManchesterAmateur Choral Competition (MACC). “I got a bit bored,” said Jeff in our rehearsal on Tuesday, “of being told how much people liked R …..” So, that’s a big thumbs up for  R …. then. (Aha, under wraps until after the MACC --- unless we’ve put you in the know.)        

We also trotted out parts of our older repertoire some of which we’d not touched since November and we were pleased to note that we still know these pieces. 

It all felt very good.

Then, of course, there was the cake.

If you were there, and /or you’ve been to one of our other Friends and Family concerts, don’t forget to let us know what you think! Post a comment here.   

Ordsall Hall Family and Friends Concert

“Our spiritual home,” Jeff calls it. Quite right too: in fact, the day I joined the choir was the very first time it rehearsed in OrdsallHall. And haven’t we come on since then? In those days you worried that you might be the only one in your section. Now we think we’re hard done by if there are only three.

It’s a lovely place to sing in. It was beautiful before its renovation. Now it is gorgeous. It’s good to see the more natural colours of the wood. The displays are enticing and it’s clear that a lot of interesting activities go on for people of all ages. And there are the ghosts, of course. They didn’t seem perturbed by our performance. The atmosphere was warm and friendly.

This was a private concert. Guests were the friends and family of choir members. There was room for seventy audience members and there are over forty of us in the choir, most of whom were there last night. So, it was by invite only.