Wednesday 1 June 2016

Tenby Male Choir – Talent spotting?


 On Thursday May 26th at St. Mary’s we had the pleasure of performing in a concert to commemorate the pending closure of the existing Tenby infants school which has been there since 1953. It is to be demolished as the children move to a new school. The concert was named “The Final Countdown”.
There were choirs from the Tenby Infants school themselves, St. Teilo’s Roman Catholic Primary school, Tenby Junior Community School, St. Mary’s church, one formed from the staff  of Tenby Infants School  and of course ourselves. If we had been scouting for potential new members for the there was certainly plenty of talent on view. As well as the choirs Rhianon Andrasko represented Ysgol Y Preseli with two pieces on the trombone, the St. Mary’s handbell choir conducted by Dr. John Harrison and livening things up enormously a jazz orchestra from Greenhill School. All in all, a very good evening.
The choir joined the Tenby Staff choir to sing Calon Lan and then performed Gwahoddiad and My Grandfather’s clock. This always entails audience participation and was particularly enjoyed by the many children there on the night.
The choir can  now concentrate on some fine tuning of our new repertoire items Working Man, Let it Be Me, the African trilogy and Diolch I’r Ior as we have no concert until 25th June when we will perform in St. Teilo’s church but there will be more on that nearer the time. It is possible on a fine evening that we may of course do a bit of harbour singing. These would be instead of a Tuesday or Thursday rehearsal but decisions on those will be made on the night.

We rehearse in our headquarters at the County Club and people are always welcome to come and listen. We often have guests from nearby hotels calling in so if you are a hotelier make a note that we rehearse on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 8pm if you wish to add a little something to their holiday. Of course we sometimes do concerts on those nights and so it’s wise to ring our secretary if you want to check. Your guests are of course more than welcome to have their holiday enhanced by coming to the concerts.

The choir is very much a community organisation and supporting the staff and infants on their evening was very much part of that. We always promote the area and do a number of concerts every year supporting local charities and also sing at other places like Cresswell Quay, Lawrenny Ferry or the Tenby or Saundersfoot harbours.

Following this theme of the choir as a community minded association one of our regrets is that we do not make more use of our headquarters at the County Club on the Croft. We would really like to make more use of the club as a base for other local organisations on a permanent or ad-hoc basis. We have a lot of spare room at the County club and we are looking to renovate some of the less maintained areas which we would be happy to do in conjunction with local organisations. So if you are an existing organisation or business or looking to start one why not talk to us to see if we can help provide some facilities. If you would like to discuss this please phone or text Allan Keating on 07967 370481.

There is much more information about the choir on our website www.tenbymalechoir.org or Facebook account (just do an internet search for Tenby Male Choir Facebook).
Alternatively our secretary David Stewart-Walvin is always glad to receive a phone call from interested people on 01834 844926.