Finally it came and now it’s gone.

Our choir has been working on Carmina Burana since September, with a break for Christmas carols, and tonight we performed along with two other local choirs at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon, which has a great acoustic for singing if not for listening.

The Bromley Youth Music Trust runs these showcase concerts at this time every year. One day for the wind bands; one day for the orchestras. MsDD was originally slated to be playing on both nights but a change to her Duke Of Edinburgh award training schedule meant that she had to miss tonight’s concert as well as yesterday’s.

This year the theme was the journey from first steps in music to enjoying it as a hobby in later life. One of the players in the Penge Strings was only 4 years old; and there is more than one person in our choir well into their 80s. Music truly does change lives.

I really enjoyed the Bromley Youth Symphony Orchestra’s contribution. There were lots of familiar faces: friends of the Boywonder and MsDD’s and I felt rather wistful again for last year when the Boywonder was a member of the BYSO. I feel devastated that, after 12 years of playing, he seems to have given up the trumpet.

It’s been great to catch up with some old familiar faces of people I knew in my previous choir but I think such a joint enterprise is an ambitious undertaking. It would have taken much more co-ordination to make sure that all choir members were producing the same sounds from the same places; that the words we were singing and the diction was the same; that our dynamics all corresponded with the demands of one conductor. For the most part it worked but, frankly, I’ll be happier when it’s back to just us singing together as a coherent unit. We are a good choir. We sound good.

I doubt, however, whether one of our soloists will be asked to perform with us again. It’s all very well being a flamboyant showman but I’d say it was fairly important to be singing the right notes. Let’s just leave that there, shall we?

The after party, a Croydon out on a Saturday night, wasn’t really a tempting prospect for me. I’m exhausted and tightly wound. It’s a break from choir for the next ten days and then time to start rehearsing for our summer concert. Who knows what we’ll be singing next.

 

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