Summer Gala 2018.
Tower Hotel Waterford, May 2018
Written by Pat McEvoy, Arts Correspondent, Waterford News & Star, ‘A View from the Green Room’.
Summer Gala, 2018
It’s end of term time for all the local choirs and the annual summer concerts are coming thick and fast. Conducted by the experienced Cian O’Carroll and with Cecilia Keogh a sympathetic accompanist at the piano, Waterford Male Voice Choir is a well-established singing group on the local arts scene and perform almost exclusively for charity. They have established a strong reputation in this niche market of male voice choirs and are only recently returned from a choral festival in Barcelona where they flew the Déise flag with honour.
It’s a summer concert with some interesting guests that add to the evening’s entertainment and compered with humour and style by WLR presenter Mary O’Neill who jogs the evening along, fills in the gaps between performances with some interesting anecdotes and fires through the raffle with the speed of a rattlegun on automatic.
The choir opens with a really big sing with the anthem from ‘Chess’ and then move through some favourites. A gentle ‘Schubert’s ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ with its minor chord feel is comforting and reassuring and its contrasting piano melody lifts the rhythm. A Michael McGlynn arrangement of ‘Geantraí’ sees lots of ‘hums’ and ‘diddledeedoos’ bouncing around the various sections of the choir with lots of tricky entries for the tenors. The late Sue Furlong’s ‘Come The Sails’ is the choirs best known and sung piece and, on a balmy May night, Sue’s comforting presence guides us toward better times ahead.
Áine McCarthy-Kent has formed trad group ‘Achara’ with former students Sylvia Dowdell and Michelle Haberlin and really light up the evening with a mix of vocals and instrumentals. There’s a folksy, intimate feel to their work that features plaintive airs, sweet falling melodies and clever conversations between the instruments. An Ed Sheerin favourite ‘Perfect’ has the crowd singing along as love and romance lingers in the air.
Liam Walsh’s interesting Trombonotics blow some mean and breezy tunes. ‘So Happy Together’ and ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ bounce around the room and convince me, at any rate, that trombones really can bone together.
Tenor Dominic McGorian is in fine dramatic mode as he explodes his way through a selection of big favourites – ‘Danny Boy’, ‘Fields of Athenry’, ‘Climb Every Mountain’ and the Andrew Bocelli favourite ‘ Time to Say Goodbye’. Jazz singer Jane O’Brien-Moran and jazz guitarist Orm Kenny bring a real sense of joy to their set. ‘Love Me Or Leave Me’ features some wonderful percussive guitar and is a bluesy piece that just never stands still; Jane is at her best in slow, plaintive lament for lost love with ‘Skylark’ before they close out the set with an upbeat ‘How High the Moon’ with lots of scoobydoos and boopidoops in a song that’s just full of upbeat banter.
The choir closes out the concert with a cracking Zulu ‘Siyahamba’ and sends us out into a much-awaited summer night with an uptempo version of ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’. These pieces convince me that the choir is at their most entertaining when their songs are uptempo and upbeat and should look at their programme to include more numbers like these.
Waterford Male Voice is a good choir that is well-organised and have established a niche role in the arts community in the city. I look forward to hearing more of them.