Music For Youth Regional Festival

Posted: 13th March 2016

On Sunday 6th March, the All Saints’ Academy Choir took part in the Music For Youth Regional Festival at Cheltenham Town Hall.

The Music For Youth Regional Festival is a platform to share your music, listen to performances from other local groups, meet other musicians and learn new skills as well as receive advice on how to improve. In addition to this, certain acts will be chosen to perform at a National Festival in Birmingham in July and the winners of this will go onto performing at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall in London in September.

The pieces that we sang were: Light a Candle, Love Grows Here and Ave Verum Corpus. I think that the experience was scary but fun, from the feedback we got, we now realise how we can still improve and what we did well. Furthermore, we really enjoyed listening to the other really talented choirs and orchestras because it showed us how good you can be with more practice and experience. We were the only choir to perform where nobody has singing lessons. We are really proud of ourselves because we have achieved a great deal and the choir has really grown and improved over the last few months.

One of the songs was sang in Latin, this was a real challenge and it was in 3 part harmony. This was a huge accomplishment because the other choirs sang in English and although we did receive constructive criticism, it made us feel like we could accomplish anything if we put our mind to it. Quotes from the judges feedback include “the harmonies were generally securely held and diction was very good” and “the 3 parts were well balanced and confidently held”. However they told us to improve by singing from memory because “it would really help to communicate the songs more effectively”, but we had only had 7 rehearsals on the Ave Verum, so were not confident to sing without the parts because it was in a different language.

By Julia Obrebska & Tamsyn Lewis

‘It was wonderful to see All Saints' Academy Choir performing at the Regional Festival of Music For Youth in Cheltenham this month.  A year on from when I first saw the choir, I was so impressed to see them looking confident and so smart up on the stage in Cheltenham Town Hall.  They handled their challenging repertoire of songs really well and it was obvious that they had worked hard on their diction as we heard every word!  It was great to see a good number of boys in the choir as well, as this provided a good warm tone to the lovely sound of the girls.  These pupils are lucky to have such encouraging and ambitious music teachers!  It is such a powerful start to a young musician’s life when there is both parental and school support – both can be so proud of these young singers who represented themselves and their school so well at one of the largest youth music festivals in the country.’

Lisa Mayo – Head of Gloucestershire Music

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