The Autumn term has been a very busy one for Serenade with two concerts, two receptions, two lots of carol singing and an appearance on Radio Leicester’s Saturday breakfast show (which was repeated on Christmas Day as part of the station’s ‘Leicestershire Choirs Special’, which was inspired by us!)
Our first ‘sing’ of the term was for the Shepshed & Hathern Forum meeting in October – we sang a few songs, exercises and nursery rhymes to welcome the members of the forum as they arrived – this was important to us as the forum had granted us some much-needed funding earlier in the year to buy music and uniforms so it was a pleasure to sing for them as a ‘thank you’.
One of our favourite moments this term has to be our very brief sing at the wedding of one of our members. On November 3rd, Laura Bridges married Andy Moore at St. Botolph’s Church and, unbeknownst to them, a gathering of some 35 ‘Serenadies’ were waiting for them outside the church to serenade them! Were we well-received? Well, we made the bride cry so that’s a success in our eyes!
The first of our two concerts was as guests of the Loughborough Concert Band (www.loughboroughconcert band.co.uk) at St. Botolph’s Church at the end of November. Over half of our ladies joined us for what turned out to be a wonderfully fun evening – we sang a few of our best pieces (accompanied by our wonderful pianist, Ness) which really impressed the crowd (Hallelujah went down particularly well) and we were delighted to join the Concert Band for the big finale. The whole event raised over £700 – a third of which has been donated to our chosen charities.
The Shepshed Community Plan Steering Group put on a fabulous evening of ‘Smart & Sparkle’ at the beginning of December where Serenade were, again, invited to sing alongside the Loughborough Concert Band to welcome guests. This time we were singing Christmas Carols which went down a storm – the evening was also Serenade’s Christmas Party so a lot of us carried on (well) into the night with dancing, eating, drinking and generally having a blast!
Our main performance of the season was our Big FREE Christmas Concert. This was very kindly hosted by Charnwood Road Baptist Church where the Rev. Ketton and members of the church went out of their way to accommodate us and help us organise the night.
We sang a few ‘non-Christmas songs’ to relax everyone, then launched into a (rather long!) set of carols and Christmas favourites, interspersed with readings of ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas’ amongst others. Audience participation was encouraged (well, you can’t go to a Carol concert and not sing along, can you?!) but we did a few ‘solo’ pieces, including Coventry Carol, Hallelujah and (the big surprise of the night after very few rehearsals) O Holy Night. The choir was so well-received and the audience was very generous in donating their money to our chosen charities
We finished the term with some good old-fashioned carol singing. Firstly outside the Shepshed Co-Op with Father Christmas and the Shepshed Lions (crikey, that was a cold day!) and then our final outing was around some of the pubs of Shepshed on ‘Mad Friday’ – we were welcomed into the Top Railway, The Railway, The Crown and The Black Swan and, oddly enough, the later it got, the more people wanted to join in with us! (We even had one guy wanting to teach us his very own carol that he’d written, but he couldn’t remember all the words!)
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