SUMMER 2024

**From Hungary to Paris**
‘Summer Chirrup’ comes to you today from the pen of Alto chief scribe, Gill Guest. Take a whistle stop tour of our choral tour to Budapest and join the choir marketing team as we wrestle with finding an appropriate name for our forthcoming concert ‘series’.
Enjoy the ride…!

**By Gill Guest - July/August 2024**

Hello Paris. Hello Olympics.

Has your ‘to do’ list triple somersaulted out of the window? Are you fast becoming an expert on sports you never knew existed? Yes, us too. Hello breakdance, and BMX tricks. The Olympics has us in its quadrennial thrall. Which is weird, when you’re a singer, not a sprinter. On the other hand, it is the holidays. Not the bucket-and-spade-and-a-beach holidays – though some of us might be doing that – the singing holidays. By which I mean a holiday from singing. So, no ferrets. No piles of icing sugar on our heads or imaginary road traffic cones on our noses. And no sparkle. To be honest I quite miss the sparkle. And the singers. Though we did deserve a break, if I say so myself. We had worked our socks off for Budapest. Which was A. MAZ. ING.

Falling in love with Budapest

We couldn’t believe the venue for our first outing. Matthias Church is so pretty that it looks like it belongs on a wedding cake. A fairytale confection of towers and turrets and icing sugar decoration. Delightful. And afterwards people kept coming up to us to tell us how much they’d enjoyed our singing or waved and yelled ‘good job’ from bus stops. What? Talk about the cherry on top of the wedding cake. Double delightful.

Our second concert was in the enormous golden basilica of St. Stephen’s. Imagine St. Paul’s Cathedral and you won’t be far off: massive dome, 10 second sound delay … and an audience of almost 300 that filled all the chairs and people had to sit on the marble steps at the back. To say that it was slightly daunting would be an understatement. But. What an amazing opportunity. An incredible privilege. We took a deep breath. Concentrated. Sent our sound soaring into that enormous golden space. And … wow. Just wow.

Audience Appreciation

We were sad when our last exultant chord of ‘Blest Pair of Sirens’ (you can’t beat Parry for a big finish) rolled away down the aisle. It was over. Except that it wasn’t. Bouncing off our previous concert experience, Charlie had invited the audience to stay, meet the choir and chat, if they wanted. And they did. ‘Merci’, ‘Bellisima’, ‘Bravo’ and the very lovely ‘Beautiful. You have uplifted my soul’. Their kind comments filled our ears. We mingled. Asked them where they were from. Discovered we’d been singing to an audience from Germany, Italy, Canada, India, Bulgaria, South Africa, England, Australia … the list kept growing. Tim, Jolene and Mirka spoke to a lady from Ukraine. You can imagine their joy, and equally Kyle’s reaction when she met a woman from America who wanted us to go and sing there. And she wasn’t the only one. Sue had the same experience, receiving an invitation for us to visit Malta. Meanwhile Kyle’s partner Nige, sitting with a couple from Australia, discovered that they had enjoyed it so much they intended to come see us again, at Nador Terem, a hall with fabulous Art Nouveau windows, so they could see us in a different setting. Talk about extreme concert going!

Undoubtedly the most moving comment of the evening came from a woman who told us she that had been feeling very low on entering church but was leaving ‘absolutely uplifted’ because of our performance of ‘O Love’, a very beautiful piece by the American Composer Elaine Hagenberg. To learn that we had had made a difference to one person who was perhaps struggling or in a dark place, through our singing, was a special moment for all of us.

But some choir members still had ‘special moments’ to come. While visiting the famous Gellert Baths the following day both Michael and Hilary were recognised as Harborough Singers − despite the fact that they were clad only in swimwear at the time. Incroyable! ‘Recognition in the street/pool’ is something that happens to actors and rock stars and yes, Olympic gold medal winners … not, surely, to people who sing in a choir? It was like being famous for a week. We came back to the UK buzzing.

**Fotheringhay in June**
Four weeks later we found ourselves facing a large audience again, this time on English soil, in the historic setting of Fotheringhay Church. The occasion was the first of a series of ‘white rose’ gigs that we’ll be doing over the next year. These are concerts in places with a Wars of the Roses, Yorkist, Richard III, connection – Fotheringhay, where he was born, York, of which he was Duke, and Leicester, where he is buried.

The Fotheringhay event was also our post-Budapest concert, and a chance to enjoy our Hungarian music all over again. Not only that, but it was summer! There was sunshine! Prosecco! Strawberries! AND a talk by English Heritage’s Nick Hill MBE on the history of the church, and what happened to the other half of it. With lots for the audience to enjoy, perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised by the capacity crowd, but we were, given that we were outside our usual ‘stamping ground’.

For our next event we’ll be back on familiar turf, in Lyddington on Saturday, November 2nd. Technically it isn’t one of our white rose gigs, but the watchtower next to the church bears the arms of John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln, who was Chancellor of all England under – you guessed − Richard III. Well. The programme will be music ‘inspired by the Bard’, since it’s 460 years since Shakespeare’s birth.

Google graphic - Summer 2024

Choir frolics - Spring 2022

Meanwhile, we’re on holiday.

How are Team GB doing in the Kite surfing? The Pole Vault? The Freestyle Wrestling (freestyle wrestling????). I potter off to my computer to check, but before I can the ‘Google Doodle’ shows me three chickens synchronised swimming in a Parisian water fountain. I try to not to watch, but it’s mesmerising. The chickens upend. Their scrawny little legs stick up out of the water like matchsticks. And I’ve gone. Mentally transported to a previous choir trip to Tuscany, where the choir’s long-suffering chairman stands obligingly in the centre of a hotel pool. He has his arms over his head while a group of altos and sopranos circle around him attempting ‘artistic swimming moves’. Artistic it is not. Swimmers and onlookers collapse in fits of hysterics. The memory brings a smile to my face, yet again. Ah me, is there no escaping them? Even in the holidays?

CHIRRUP - Summer 2024

SUMMER 2024

CHIRRUP - Spring 2024