Category Archives: New Dublin Voices and other choral singing

New Dublin Voices and other choral singing, what I'm up to

New Dublin Voices win in Budapest

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This is still sinking in…!

Outside the Palace of Arts in Budapest
Outside the Palace of Arts in Budapest
Leading Irish chamber choir New Dublin Voices has won the Grand Prix at the prestigious Budapest International Choir Competition.
The choir’s founder and conductor Bernie Sherlock also scooped the award for best conductor at the competition which featured 48 choirs from 15 different countries.
New Dublin Voices was the unanimous choice of all ten judges for First Prize, the first time this has happened in 10 years.
The choir travelled to Hungary having just won the inaugural ESB Feis Ceol Choir of the Year at the RDS in Dublin last month.
In the first round, New Dublin Voices beat choirs from the USA, Hungary, Norway and Serbia to come first in the chamber choir class and go through to the Grand Prix Final on Wednesday night.
The Grand Prix featured the winners from each of eight classes (male-voice, female-voice, large choir, children’s choir, etc) in the first round. All ten judges voted to give overall First Prize to New Dublin Voices.
Prize monies totalling €6000 from Budapest and Feis Ceol will allow the choir, which as yet receives no public or private funding, to take up one of only eight invitations issued to adult choirs to compete at the elite Marktoberdorf International Chamber Choir Competition in Germany in June.
About New Dublin Voices
New Dublin Voices, formed by conductor Bernie Sherlock in October 2005, is a non-professional chamber choir of 25 singers. The choir gives regular concerts in leading Irish venues featuring fresh and adventurous programming. Competitive successes include National Choir of the Year in 2006 and 2008 (Navan Choral Festival), several awards at the Cork International Choral Festival, including National Choir of the Festival in 2006, and numerous prizes at Dublin Feis Ceol prior to this year’s inaugural ESB Feis Ceol Choir of the Year. The choir is especially interested in the music of living composers and has given many Irish and world premieres.
About the Budapest International Choir Competition
This was the 12th running of the Budapest International Choir Competition which has taken place every two years since 1981. It is part of the wider Musica Mundi organisation which creates and maintains choral competitions around Europe and which in 2010 will host the 6th World Choir Games in China. This year’s jury panel comprised esteemed judges from Italy, Russia, Greece, Germany, Indonesia, and South Africa as well as from Hungary.
For further information please contact Mike Dungan, 087 9902175, or Cliona Donnelly at clionadonnelly@hotmail.com
music, New Dublin Voices and other choral singing, what I'm up to

New Dublin Voices on Facebook

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If you’re interested in keeping up with what New Dublin Voices are up to and hearing about upcoming concerts, then please become our fan on Facebook.

Our next concert is on Sunday 1st February in St Brigid’s church in Cabinteely, County Dublin.  It will feature some of our favourite pieces as well as some solo and duet pieces in what will be a concert to suit all ages.  Proceeds will go to the charity PREDA.

I hope to have completed a new St Brigid hymn for the occasion…

composers, New Dublin Voices and other choral singing, what I'm up to

Christmas success for New Dublin Voices

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New Dublin Voices had a very busy Christmas season with concerts in Navan, Dublin (performing for the Friends of the National Gallery, singing carols in Dickensian garb on the steps of The Gate theatre before the opening night of ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ and doing a lunchtime concert in the National Concert Hall) and Blanchardstown.  We also kept popping up on television – appearing on the teen segment ‘TTV’, on the fashion show ‘Off The Rails’, at the end of the news one day, and on the broadcast of us singing with The Priests at their concert in Armagh.

The icing on the Christmas cake was winning the prize for the best performance of the RTÉ lyric fm Christmas Carol Commission by Elaine Agnew.

Here’s my recording of the ladies of New Dublin Voices, conducted by Bernie Sherlock, with me accompanying on piano, singing the lovely Curoo curoo.

Our first concert in 2009 will be of music from the 1560s and the 1960s.  First rehearsal is on Tuesday…

links, lyrics and lines I especially admire, New Dublin Voices and other choral singing, togetherness, what I'm up to

A beautiful Christmas song

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I was introduced to Eclecticity today by Rowan Manahan, whose witty and informative blog I would recommend to anyone who likes to laugh and has to work for a living.

I sing in a choir and, it being the season, we’ve been singing lots of Christmas music.  Yesterday, in fact, we barged on screen during the link after Home and Away on RTÉ two and sang ‘Ding dong merrily on high’, complete with santa hats.  You can see it on the website until the end of the month – find ‘Monday 15th December part three’.

And so, via Eclecticity, I’d like to share this song with you, ‘Grown up Christmas list’.  It’s performed here by Amy Grant and was written by David Foster and Linda Thompson-Jenner.  (If you want an eye-watering biography, look no further than Mr Foster’s: the man is a legend!)  This song has been recorded by a few big names, but I think this version is the most honest and touching.  One for the virtual stocking…?

New Dublin Voices and other choral singing, songs for children, what I'm up to

last month in a nutshell

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It has been a very busy four weeks since I last posted something.  Here are some highlights:

  • the first stage of the Infant Imaginings project drew to a close.  Helene Hugel and I have been working on a number of fifteen-minute pieces for babies (between three and twenty-four months) over the past while and we presented them last week in Tallaght Community Arts Centre and in a health clinic.  All being well (i.e. if the funding comes through!) we’ll be developing our work further in the second half of next year.
  • I met a singer-songwriter who I really enjoyed – Audrey Ryan, from Maine.  The first time was at a singer-songwriter night in The Stables in Mullingar where I was playing with Hamlet.  It was Halloween, she played ‘The Monster Mash’ (it caught on in a flash, for your information).  Second time was at The Song Room the following week and she’d been up all night watching Obama win the election.
  • I did a schools project in Navan and wrote a lovely song for the kids to sing (which I’ll post soon).
  • New Dublin Voices did two concerts which featured the beautiful choral music of Jaakko Mäntyjärvi, a Finnish composer.  The choir sang one of his pieces last year, the exquisite Die Stimme des Kindes, and we reprised that and two of the works that helped make him one of the very best composers writing for mixed voice choirs today: Canticum Calamatatis Maritimae and Four Shakespeare Songs.  I urge you to download this stunning version of Die Stimme des Kindes performed by the all-male American choir, Chanticleer.
  • Hamlet played his Bewley’s theatre gig to a nicely-packed room backed by ‘The Handsome Strangers’ – me on keys/cajon/backing vocals, Barry Rycraft on double bass and Satya Darcy on drums.  There are some videos on Hamlet’s Facebook group, which you can join for updates on his musical adventures.  Next on the horizon is the recording this weekend of his debut EP…
composition, New Dublin Voices and other choral singing

New term

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September is the real turning point of the year – the beginning of the new school term. It would be interesting to know why it was settled on that children would begin/resume their studies in the first month of autumn. My immediate thought was that it probably has to do with the agricultural calendar, like a lot of our conventions (for example, the clocks falling back and springing forward). It surely would have been more useful to have all available helpers on the farm at harvest, though, rather than reading, writing and arithmeticking…?

For me, the new term brings with it some new opportunities: I’m working with Helene Hugel, a puppeteer and clown doctor, and mentor Tim Webb, director of children’s theatre company Oily Cart, on a project for children between 6 months and 2 years old; I’ve also devised a ‘Magic Moment’ that our choir, ‘New Dublin Voices‘, will perform as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival next week.

There are a dozen ideas/resolutions that I want to pursue and develop, too:

• A generative composition (i.e. one based on an algorithm or set of rules);
• A piece of podcast theatre;
• Talks for fledgling concert-goers;
• Going to ten symphony orchestra concerts during the year and blogging about them;
• Devoting a lot more time to practicing the clarinet with a view to joining an orchestra or band;
• Recording the wedding music I’ve written to date and promoting that side of my work.

Also, having attended the Association of Irish Choir’s choral conducting course in August, I want to see if there are any opportunities to do some work with a choir…

That’s probably enough to be getting on with!

composers, New Dublin Voices and other choral singing

warming up the pipes

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The triennial Pipeworks festival is in full flow at the moment – the Great is coupled to the pedals and all the stops are out (or something). I don’t really know a huge amount about the pipe organ but what little knowledge I do possess leaves me in awe of really good organists. I’ve had the privilege of witnessing a number of really excellent players – usually it’s difficult to actually see what’s going on because they’re up in the organ loft, obscured from the vision of those below. (I just had a random image of Superman III – you know the big computer they build to take over the world? Now I’m not saying that such megalomaniacal tendencies are lying dormant just below the surface of organ designers/players but just compare…)

The picture on the left is the magnificent organ at St Giles cathedral in Edinburgh (city of my alma mater) and the image on the right is, of course, the aforementioned supercomputer from Superman III.

Anyway, there are lots of chances left to experience the rare pleasure that is the skilful and artful manipulation of the manuals, stops and pedals of a top-class pipe organ. This year is also the centenary of the birth of Olivier Messiaen, perhaps the most important composer of organ music of the twentieth century. A synchronicity of cosmic proportions such as this should not be overlooked. Here’s what’s available for your listening pleasure:

tonight (thurs 26jun) 9pm Saint Patrick’s cathedral: David Leigh plays Messiaen’s Livre de Saint-Sacrement

fri 27jun

  • 1.15pm St Mary’s pro-cathedral: David Leigh plays Messiaen’s Les corps glorieux
  • 8pm National Concert Hall: symphony orchestra plays Messiaen’s L’Ascension, Poulenc’s Organ Concerto (with soloist Thomas Trotter), and Faure’s Requiem (with the choirs of St Pat’s and St Mary’s). This is a hugely talented bunch of musicians gathering to play really fantastic music.

sat 28jun

  • 3pm City Hall: New Dublin Voices and three other choirs do a concert in the opulent surroundings (and lovely acoustic) of the city hall, at the top of Parliament Street. Each choir will do some music on their own and we’re also going to be joining together to sing some pieces. It’s free, so please come along and delight your eardrums for as long as you feel like 🙂

sun 29jun

  • 5pm Saint Patrick’s cathedral: the festival finale; “…the presentation of a Vespers in seventeenth century Lutheran manner. With massed choral forces, brass accompaniment and the glorious acoustic of Ireland’s largest cathedral, this event promises a rousing conclusion to the festival.” We’re singing at this, too. The Lutheran church in its hey-day was the absolute bees knees in terms of music and spectacle. Songs of Praise just doesn’t cut it compared to this! If the stones of the world’s cathedrals could talk, they’d ask for this kind of church service. Come along and rejoice with the stones of St Pat’s as they get a proper pampering session!

more info (prices, telephone booking numbers etc.) can be found at the Pipeworks website

New Dublin Voices and other choral singing, what I'm up to

Breaking radio silence

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It has been too long! Jen and I have just moved house and yesterday the nice man from chorus ntl came and installed my lovely new 12Mb connection (we’ll see how that works out, but it’s pretty zippy; eircom’s top package is only 3Mb). What’s with all these internet providers and their lower case names?! I am partial to a bit of lower case myself, it must be said.

Lots has happened over the last couple of weeks:

  • spent a lovely weekend in Donegal, like Mediterranean lovely! I brought the guitar along and my book of Michael Hedges transcriptions. Have discovered an out-of-tune fret on my guitar which I’ll have to get the guys in the shop to have a look at.
  • New Dublin Voices went on a trip to France to compete in the 37th Florilège Vocal de Tours. We had a crazy time getting there – our 6.25am flight was diverted to Lille…driver we’d booked wouldn’t wait or drive to get us…the coach company had made us pay in full in advance…we had to splash out for the TGV to Tours…!! After all that we had to perform in the qualifying rounds once we got there. Amazingly we got through to the final of the class for choirs of 14-24 singers, disappointingly losing out to choirs from Iceland and Ukraine. (Apparently it’s not ‘THE Ukraine’). We did, however, win a special prize for performance of a new work: Enda Bates’s mesmeric Sea Swell. Here’s a recording of the piece that Enda made last week in the Unitarian church on Stephen’s Green where we rehearse:  Here’s a recording, too, of our performance of Poulenc’s Hodie Christus natus est in the final:  Such a good weekend and I’m sure there’ll be pictures soon. It was, as ever, good to hear other choirs and to get to spend a bit more time together as a group 🙂
  • Last night NDV undertook the mammoth task of recording all the pieces we worked on for the competitions this term. We had the use of the Church of Ireland’s educational centre chapel, which has a lovely acoustic and gave us the aural gratification necessary to get us through the sixteen-odd pieces! I took the opportunity to try out my new Zoom H4 recording device and it’ll be interesting to hear how it compares to the more expensive mics that Derby was using to record us.
New Dublin Voices and other choral singing

photographs from Navan

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This is a slightly more involved process than we usually like in internet world, but there are some great shots at the end of the journey…

  • go to Barry Cronin’s photography portal
  • enter your name and email address to gain access
  • click on the ‘Thumbnails’ tab at the top right of the page
  • use the navigator at the top left of the page to go to page six (…then seven, then eight)
  • the photos of New Dublin Voices are numbered from 217 to 233

I must work on being more interesting while singing, clearly! I only made it into one picture – 225.

composers, New Dublin Voices and other choral singing

choir of the year

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New Dublin Voices travelled to Navan on Sunday for the Bord Na Móna Choral Festival. We were entered for three competitions: the popular music competition, the living composer competition and the Choir of the Year competition.

In the popular music competition we sang Sing a song of sixpence by John Rutter and Drive my car (an arrangement by the Swingle Singers of the Beatles’ opener from their ‘Rubber Soul’ album). We were delighted to win the first prize.

The living composer competition was held in the Church of Ireland building, which had a much nicer acoustic than either the community hall where the poplar music competition was held or, indeed, the Solstice arts centre that the festival has been held in for the last two years. We performed a piece we’d premièred at a concert in Trinity college chapel in January, Enda Bates‘s Sea Swell. The piece is written for four choirs of soprano, alto, tenor and bass, positioned at corners of the room. It starts with a notation of the sound of the tide on a beach, moving throughout the sixteen parts and growing in intensity until a series of notes is picked out in the female voices. A number of other melodies are passed and overlapped between the singers and the effect is very mesmeric. We enjoyed performing the piece and it was fun to see the audience twisting and turning while trying to figure out where all the sounds were originating from! Next we performed Ian Wilson‘s setting of the e.e. cummings poem nine(birds)here. This went better than it had in Cork – it’s one of the more difficult pieces we sing in terms of the richly dissonant writing – and we were again delighted to win the first prize in the first year of this competition class. It was interesting to hear some of the other pieces, too. I particularly liked a piece written by Martin O’Leary (who was present) called donna nobis which was impressively performed by three students of NUI Maynooth.

After some well-needed carvery food at the hotel next door and some more practice we went back over to the church to sing in the main ‘choir of the year’ competition. We were up against some excellent groups from various parts of Ireland and, when it came time for the adjudication to be announced we were all really impressed and wouldn’t have minded not winning (well, maybe…). We had performed our two most exciting pieces: Wade in de water, with its foot-stamping build-up in the middle, and Iuppiter, which left us all completely drained with its relentless drama and sheer density of texture. The last two pages of Iuppiter consist of hammering semiquavers in all (eight) parts, everyone intoning the names of Jupiter (“…TonansStatorVictorIuppiterPluviusSummanusCaelestis…”) in a barrage of sound that culminates in everyone chanting louder and louder in free rhythm until there comes a pause and we all forcibly whisper “Iuppiter!” in unison. When it works, the effect is electric…and it worked on Sunday! The prizes were announced in reverse order – distinctions went to Grovesnor choir from Belfast and Enchiriadis from Malahide; second prize to Vocare, a fledgling ensemble from Wexford who were great crack and are definitely ones to watch. By this stage the tension was almost unbearable in our stuffy gallery seats as we flashed excited looks to each other. When the affirmative pronouncement came we exploded into cheers, reserving a extra big one for when Bernie went up to collect the cup. Onwards now to the competition in Tours in a couple of weeks!