Well , it’s been another good month for VoiceMale. The highlight for us four was performing at the National Street Choirs Festival in Whitby (see www.streetchoirwhitby2011.wordpress.com). We sang in front of an audience of approx 600 at the beautiful and splendorous Whitby Spa. Most of the audience was made up of the 30+ choirs who’d come from all around the country. So no pressure there then! We are pleased to say that we went down very well (well we would wouldn’t we!). As well as a lovely warm applause for our songs, alot of good positive comments came to us afterwards from audience members who passed by in the break and at other times over the weekend. We chose contrasting pieces. One of which was ‘Bus Story’ by Leon Rosselson and arranged by VoiceMale’s very own Damian. In our usual style, we did quite a bit of theatrical and humorous performance of this song: we stood 2 in front, 2 behind as if we were on a bus. We did bus things like reading, texting, listening to music and then sang the song about how sad it was how passengers don’t make any contact with each other. By contrast I think we made quite a bit of contact with our audience as we sung this song to them.
The contrasting piece was Tserelem. This is a love ballad from Hungary which I’d picked up over 20 years ago when I was on a student exchange. The student I was being hosted by took me to a community hall where we saw a folk band called Sebo. I arranged the instrumental piece they played into an acappela version using that wonderful eastern European drone backing to the main tune.
Thanks to Stephen for taking some good photos of us as we performed at Whitby. For more of Stephen’s excellent photos contact him on: stepheng@blueyonder.co.uk
By the way I hope you’ll come and see us at our next gigs coming up: Saltaire festival Sept 11th at Roberts Park bandstand 12.30-7pm (http://www.saltairefestival.co.uk/Whats_on_Event. ), Topic Folk Club on Nov 17th (www.topic-folk-club.org.uk) and Raise Your Banners Festival Nov 26th (www.raiseyourbanners.org)
Keith
The contrasting piece was Tserelem. This is a love ballad from Hungary which I’d picked up over 20 years ago when I was on a student exchange. The student I was being hosted by took me to a community hall where we saw a folk band called Sebo. I arranged the instrumental piece they played into an acappela version using that wonderful eastern European drone backing to the main tune.
Thanks to Stephen for taking some good photos of us as we performed at Whitby. For more of Stephen’s excellent photos contact him on: stepheng@blueyonder.co.uk
By the way I hope you’ll come and see us at our next gigs coming up: Saltaire festival Sept 11th at Roberts Park bandstand 12.30-7pm (http://www.saltairefestival.co.uk/Whats_on_Event. ), Topic Folk Club on Nov 17th (www.topic-folk-club.org.uk) and Raise Your Banners Festival Nov 26th (www.raiseyourbanners.org)
Keith