Leslie Garrett Sings, And We're In The Times

Just a few bits and pieces as we wind up into the week befor Various Voices. The first is to say that Leslie Garrett who is everyone's favourtie soprano will be at the opening ceremony of Various Voices together with Sandy Toksvig. We weren't totally sure she'd be coming, but she has agreed and will be singing "You'll Never Walk Alone". We will be performing this at the memorial for the "Remember Justin" event later on Saturday. She will also be starting off our festival song "Here's Where I Stand". A real pity the Pinkies are due in tech rehearsals when this is going on. But there is a chance that we might be out in time.

The other biggie news is that we are in the centre right paper, the Times. I'm so proud that we have come from a marginalized part of society to one which is celebrated.

Various Voices: It's Starting!

It's really starting. Really, really starting! For those of us in the Pinkies who have been working on the Various Voices committee for the last four years it is with a combination of relief and trepidation that we see the fruits of our labour finally paying off.

We returned from Paris on a bit of a high, and this Sunday it was time to learn new music as well as rehearse our performance for Various Voices. It is going to be huge. Most of the pieces are in place, but there are still some people snatching the odd glance at the lyrics. Still, we are sounding better and better. We still have two more rehearsals to fully polish the pieces.

The rehearsals for the festival choir have also started, and we are performing Carmina Burana in the Royal Festival Hall. It is always interesting singing with another choir, and this time we are performing with Voicelab and the London Philharmonic choir. I thought our tenors were loud. Even the whispered start of Ecce Gratum sounded thunderous! Hard to imagine how loud it will be when the full complement of 300 singers gets onto stage!

Last night was also our only rehearsal of the Voices Of Our City joint song: All Over The World. It actually sounded really good, despite the misgivings we had. Part of this was due to the way in which the song is written, so you can't really sing it with just one choir.

I am getting really excited now - Various Voices is one of the biggest showcases of LGBT music anywhere, and the fact that we are doing this on a prestigious national and indeed global platform, on such a scale, is a tremendous achievement for us and our community!

Entente Cordiale

Last Thursday the 9th of April 2009 will go down in history as one of those days to commemorate Anglo-French co-operation. Yep! The Pinkies were back in Paris, this time as the guests of our good friends Equivox, the Melo'men and Caramel Fous. We were all in town as part of a concert called Des Voix Contre le SIDA to raise funds for Les Petits Bonheur, an organization providing support for those with AIDS.

Of course, we were really excited about it: it is a rare privelege that an outside choir gets asked to this event, and even moreso that we were the headline act. Over the last few months we've been rolling our Rs int he three French songs we performed - Dirait'On, La Mer and Il Faudra Le Dire, and thanks to Johnathon's patient coaching (and vocal recordings done in the loos of the Place) we didn't mangle the language too much.

Most of us arrived by train, and I have to say that half the fun is in getting to Paris with the others. We had enough time to drop our bags with our hosts from Equivox and grab a quick bite before making our way down to the Trianon theatre for the late afternoon rehearsal. It was a blisteringly hot day and I was thankful for having packed a pair of shorts.

La Mer was supposed to be the 'secret' encore number, so it was the song we rehearsed first. Everyone was really excited and the first run through hit a few hiccoughs, but we were pretty confident.

The Pink Singers do what we do very well, which is sing with occasional movements. I am not sure we can physically do both simultaneously without breaking something. So when the concert began, I have to say that I was terribly impressed with both the Melo'men and Caramel Fous, both of which I watched from the gods. Caramel Fous is not so much a choir as a theatrical group, and they could dance in synchrony while singing, which is an achievement in itself. Sadly, my French is non-existant, and many of the jokes (evident from the hearty laughing from the French audience) were lost on me. Melo'men gave us a slight cause for a heart attack because they performed America, a song we were due to perform in the second half, albeit a different arrangement. Theirs was a medley, and they staged it flamboyantly, with a statue of liberty and a group of guys dressed like the village people. I was sitting next to Kate O, and at the end we turned to each other and asked, "Aren't they supposed to be keeping the best for the last?" We wondered how we were supposed to top that!

After the interval we gathered back stage, and it was time for Equivox to go on. Sadly, we couldn't really hear their performance from where we were in the wings, but they are always so theatrical and it was wonderful to see them in their shiny outfits. They are celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, and the Pinkies have a special place in their hearts for our counterparts in Paris.

Then it was time for us to shine! We joined Equivox on stage for a joint performance of Dirait'On, then continued by ourselves with Dies Irae from Karl Jenkins' Requiem. The audience really seemed to love it, and as the performance went on the cheers literally became more and more hysterical. By the time we got to the end of Forever Motown I was actually worried that the audience was going to rush the stage! The cynic in me wondered whether the French were just being polite, but the floor rumbling, screams and thunderous applause suggested a considerable disinhibition on their part which was too genuine to fake.

Forever Motown was our official ending song, but because we made two curtain calls, Johnathon came forward and asked them (rhetorically) whether they wanted to hear any more. So to excited cheers we performed La Mer. Well, the French really, really loved it, and I have to say that as a choir we really fed off their energy. Paris will go down as one of our best gigs in living memory. We love Paris, and we love the Parisians!

A Few Random Things

The Pink Insider has discovered the power of Twitter and sadly is starting to microblog there. I won't release the address yet, because I fear that I might eventually give up over here on the regular blog. There is a certain elegance to being able to write in complete sentences. Here are a few things I've posted over there already.

1. MuseScore
I am a fan of cross platform and especially open source software, even more so when it is free. When it comes to musical notation the software I use is the ridiculously expensive Sibelius. That's why I am very glad to see the marvellous MuseScore available for download. Check it out now!

2. Inuit Throat Singing
If you went on one of the Pink Singers winter weekends away a number of years ago, you may remember Fran trying to teach us how to "throat sing". Of course, having never heard it before, none of her acolytes could actually do it, so it is interesting all these years later to see a couple of pros (okay, high school girls) performing it so well.
The first thing to say is that it sounds an awful lot like burping (I have a cousin who given a can of warm Coke and a firm shake can burp through his ABCs) but in a rather controlled way, so it can create a tempo like a percussion instrument. The second thing to say is that the resonance chamber in the neck seems to fill and empty like a bullfrog. Very cool and strangely hypnotic.