Can you Feel the Love Tonight (twice)?

The Royal Albert Hall & Wemmel in Belgium; two performances of Can You Feel the Love Tonight? in short succession, but different circumstances...

Firstly the RAH for Christmas with the Stars in aid of Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research.... splendid evening, all accompanied and compered by Frank Renton and his excellent Brass Band.
We'd not done Can You Feel...? with Brass Band before, and a great experience it was...

Ann Reid, Patricia Hodge, Deborah Meaden, Michel Roux jnr., Julia Bradbury, Tony Audenshaw & lots more of the Emmerdale cast, Graham Le Saux (who introduced us), & Sydenham Girls choir....were all there, as well as a surprise guest Andrea Faustini from X-factor and his mentor Mel B.... (I am sure I am not the first to point out the splendidly ironic surname he has for an X-factor contestant)...
He sang beautifully... and everyone in the Hall promised to vote for him at the weekend!!

Our Festival of Carols in Two Minutes and 12 days with apt noises also brought the house down...
...wonderful evening and cause for which to make money.

...and here is the place being brought down, just a few moments after it all finished:-

 

After this splendour we quickly went down to the SW for some fantastically blue-skied and sunny hours in Bradford-on Avon... & here is proof (with a bit of a lorry on the bridge)!

 

 

Excellent concert for some old folks down there... and all had a good time!

 

Then it was back to Europe, (we're here for the next 11 days)... starting with the next Sarah-Ann Cromwell guest show in Wemmel, Belgium... Showtime all went very well!

More on this after Aalst (the première).... however...

 

Audience loved it, and we're looking forward to doing it all again in Aalst on Saturday (it's sold out, sorry!)... of course we'll fit in a Christmas show tonight first in Tienen...

Hooray...









Elgar Room - Masterpieces

A wonderful evening at the Royal Albert Hall...
..whilst hordes of schoolchildren were enjoying day three of the Music & Youth concerts in the RAH, we gave our Masterpieces in the Elgar Room - a splendid room for cabaret there.

Having had a great evening there last Christmas, it was a delight to repeat the excellent experience ...

There are photos of famous artists all round the room, so we had the idea (well, Richard did!) of giving an entertainment where all the people pictured are heard.... I won't go into it in nit-picking detail, but all these people were name-checked and at least one piece of theirs heard...

Edward Elgar
Nina Simone
Yehudi Menuhin
Jacqueline Du Pré
Frank Zappa
Ray Charles
Johnny Cash
Jimmy Hendrix
Pavarotti
James Brown
Ella Fitzgerald
Frank Sinatra
George Harrison & John Lennon
Duke Ellington
Marvin Gaye
& also
Elton John (his picture is not there, but his red grand piano is on permanent loan to the room!)

To complete this task 37 pieces were required - some of these were in medleys, otherwise we'd have been there all night!
Lots of new things for us, and amongst the splendour was a recreation of the duet of It's a Man's Man's Man's World  as sung by two of our photos - James Brown and Pavarotti! We also found another way of hijacking the audience (well, a couple in it) using Frank Zappa!
Also a chance to do some things in the UK that have previously been only seen on mainland Europe, such as our Beatles medley on a train & our Pomp and Circumstance/Best of British parody... (both as imagined by Julian and Maggie Forsyth).

We were joined on the piano by our old friend Paul Plummer... excellent to work with him again.

Huge fun!

Elgar Room - Royal Albert Hall

It's only small, so get your tickets soon!
We are back at the Elgar Room at 8pm on November 13th, after our Christmas show there last year...

Details here...

...should be fun; there are lots of photos in the room of famous RAH types - and we are going to sing them all... come along and see how (why?) we do it...

Royal Albert Hall

Wonderful evening in the Royal Albert Hall, in the Elgar Room.
A packed room (we could only just get to the stage!) of people from all over - quite a high percentage of Scandanavians! - enjoyed a great Christmas atmosphere.
The ever-excellent Chris Hatt joined us at the piano for all sorts of Seasonal, funny & nostalgic items.

Winter Wonderland, Festival of Carols in 2 minutes & Chestnuts Roasting...
Oranges and lemons (as from our new Songbook - the Great British a cappella one)
...and naturally the Hee Bee Gee Bees!
Mike did his Bing thing too on White Christmas too...
...and Strangers in the Night, with a huge photo of Ol' Blue Eyes looking on...

Lovely room & terrific happy people...

Hope we'll be back!

EPAM London concert

The EPAM 'Music is Everywhere' Christmas party...
Wonderful evening at St Mary-at-the-Wall in the City - lovely church... a friend who was there tells me it looks in fine nick because it had a fire in the 1980s and so the decor is all rather new (and of course beautiful!)
Lovely to finally watch the super Voces8 live, as they joined the EPAM stable this year; and also the splendid Fugata Quintet who did some excellent Piazzola.
Two school choirs were also on show, and were excellent; one the choir from Beaumont School, St Albans who sang together the lovely Second Eve by Ola Gjeilo (published by Edition Peters):- also their six-part male voice group who beautifully sang a wonderful song from Adele.  The second choir were from St Edmund's, Canterbury who sang Shenandoah.  Both groups had worked with Voces8 in workshops.

All the choral forces joined together to sing John Cage's Four² - a great experience!

Looking forward on Saturday to a sold out gig at a room in the Royal Albert Hall - wanted to, but just could not leave the words "a room in" from that last sentence!

Seasons of Love

Fabulous charity evening at the Royal Albert Hall a few days ago...
Lovely array of stars, and a gloriously moving & life-enhancing show for all.
Lynda Bellingham, Janie Dee, Jennifer Ellison, Jan Harvey, Julia Hills, Sue Holderness, Lesley Joseph, Gay Soper, Hannah Waterman, June Watson, Stephen Tomkinson, Christopher Timothy, Peter Skellern, Richard Stilgoe, Edward Baruwa, Tiffany Graves, Patrick Doyle, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Tim Firth, Alan Titchmarsh, Tabitha Webb, Debbie Kurup, DMJ & Willy Russell... were all there live; John Alderton, Julie Walters, Celia Imrie & Patricia Hodge all appeared on film with messages of support.

Also on film was Neil Sedaka, who was clearly delighted that we sang his song, Calendar Girl... we were delightfully aided in not looking too dreadful in our 'dancing' as we were joined by the gorgeous and talented, Rossana Stocchino & Lucie Waugh, who danced beautifully.
We also sang Scarborough Fair (in our great John Rutter arrangement) with the excellent harpist, Vicky Lester.

Another wonderful moment, when a young tenor from the West End Chorus, Ian, stepped in at just a few hours notice, and sang the absurdly hard song, 'Til I Hear You Sing from Lloyd Webber's Love Never Dies - terrific job to learn a song over night & do it so amazingly in the show

The show was a celebration of the work of those WI Calendar Girls who we know from the film and stage play, but are real splendid Yorkshire people whose calendar has to date made £3m for Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research...
The audience, it was clear, loved the film, the play and these amazing fund-raisers.
The evening culminated in the real Calendar Girls, along with their photographer Terry Logan, coming onstage, and being the recipients of the first Baker awards, which will from now on be awarded annually for people who do great things for fund-raising.
The 'Girls' were tickled pink when the postman from their village of Cracoe, who had only been to London once before ("It's all right", he said when asked by Alan T. how he found it)... very moving and funny all at once.
Indeed we all sang Jerusalem together at the end it all...

Hugh Wooldridge as ever, did a wonderful, efficient job devising and directing all this, and getting it to work in the RAH over just a few hours... super MD: Kevin Amos, wonderful choreographer: Kevan Allen.

PS: lovely also for me to hear once more Make Our Garden Grow from Bernstein's Candide, which we had sung at our wedding...

Blieskastel, DE

Another excellent a cappella nacht organised by Peter Martin Jacob & Magenta, this time in Blieskastel... with some new and some old friends...
Lovely to see our Belorussian friends, Camerata, and to meet the male quartet Die Bogarts who are based in Berlin.
A packed crowd enjoyed all three groups & cheered us to the rafters...
A terrific evening, and lots of convivial meals too!
Delightfully, we're back in the same hall in Blieskastel, doing our Best of British show on Valentine's Day next year... How romantic!

In the last few days we have been rehearsing, and are now looking forward to our bits in Seasons of Love at the Royal Albert Hall tomorrow evening... at 6pm... along with Stilgoe and Skellern, Janie Dee, Stephen Tomkinson, Lynda Bellingham and Alan Titchmarsh amongst others, as well as the City of London Philharmonic and our old friends the West End Chorus...
We're singing Scarborough Fair as well as the Neil Sedaka hit - Calendar Girl - the evening is in aid of Leukaemia charities, and some of those Calendar Girls will be there...
Climaxing with that great WI hit... Jerusalem!

Wonderful Captain Beaky for UNICEF

Fantastic evening at the RAH... Captain Beaky and his wonderful band were all there... Lots of dancers from National Youth Ballet (playing a large array of animals - not a dry eye at times), and a Kirov & ENB master, Dmitri Gruzdyev, as well as Jeremy Lloyd & Jim Parker (writer and composer), Joanna Lumley, Roger Moore & Deborah Moore, Alan Titchmarsh, Hugh Bonneville, Rosie Ashe & the original Captain Beaky himself, Keith Michell, appearing both on large screen and in a box in the audience to rapturous applause. Also old friends from Chess in Concert, Tabitha Webb, Tiffany Graves, Caroline Sheen, & Jon Robyns - who used his Avenue Q experience to bring Hissing Sid to life!

Our contributions were accompanying Rosie in Desmond the Duck, being accompanied by David Firman & the excellent band in Doreen the Duckling, and getting away from ducks, we sang an a cappella Wendell the Worm.  We provided comments from 'offstage' in a poem read by Joanna Lumley - back to the Ds... Dilys the Dachshund, and we all sang together in There's a Light...

Splendid to see the octogenarians strut their stuff, Roger Moore in his DJ (only with green tights on his legs - he told us it was all the rage); and Jeremy Lloyd clearly moved and loving his words being displayed again to a packed house.

Mike gave Alan T. a DVD copy of Christmas Pebble Mill show that had involved both AT and Cantabile in the 1980s... the green-fingered one was delighted and said he had nothing from that time he could watch!

A glorious evening - all in aid of UNICEF... & put together by Director, Hugh Wooldridge with his usual aplomb - let's hope it can happen again sometime...
I'll ask Joanna the next time I see her at my local bus station (I've seen her before!)