New Dublin Voices made the annual pilgrimage to Cork this weekend for the International Choral Festival. Although we didn’t have any luck impressing the judges this time, it was a really fun weekend. We sang four pieces in the big competition:

• Nicolette – Ravel
• nine(birds)here – Ian Wilson
• Unser leben währet siebnzig jahr – Schein
• Iuppiter – Michael Ostrzyga

The choir that won, Consono from Köln in Germany, were the choir that Iuppiter was written for and, in a flurry of slight inebriation and giddy exuberence, we aurally assaulted the innocent bystanders at the festival club on Sunday evening by singing the piece all together. Great fun, although in retrospect perhaps a little out of place amongst the piano-keys neckties and close-harmony jazz sounds of the festival club…! Down in the bar earlier we had great fun singing The King’s Singers’ Humpty Dumpty (a piece we performed at last year’s festival) with Molto cantabile from Switzerland, who sang it this year with some great choreography.

We also performed, as all the international competition choirs did, in the gala concert. By this stage we knew that we hadn’t won anything and so, with a kind of joyous indignation, we put our all into the two pieces:

• Wade in de water – Allen Koepke
• Drive my car – Lennon & McCartney, arr. Simon Lesley

We haven’t got any pictures from the weekend yet (and hopefully there’ll be some video footage made available, too) but here’s a recording that was made of us last year singing a piece called Rotaļa by Juris Karlsons: