National Celtic Festival

The choir, for the second year running, performed at the National Celtic Festival at Port Arlington over the Queen’s Birthday weekend.

The first concert was at St John’s Church where an early crowd was invited to warm up with the choir, which they did most happily. The church soon filled up and a partition was opened to allow the overflow to be seated for the concert. During the hour allotted, a wide variety of numbers were performed. Stephen Pepper taught the willing audience a famous Welsh word with a good deal of laughter. Bob Ash sang the thought-provoking Working Man and the Celtic Medley consisted of Graeme Sanderson with the Cornish tune Trelawny, Roger Bartlett with the Northern Irish Carrickfergus, Alex van Mens with the Scottish Highland Cathedral and Drew Hopkins with the Irish Spanish Lady, complete with enthusiastic clapping and whacking by patrons and choir alike.

The finale was our special arrangement of Waltzing Matilda performed by Drew and Geoff Serpell to great acclaim.

On the Sunday morning we set up in the larger venue of Parks Hall to perform a similar program, again starting with warming up the audience along with the choristers. In between a range of full choral pieces, some different soloists performed– Barry McMahon sang the Scottish Wild Mountain Thyme and Ken Simpson featured on Highland Cathedral. Stephen Lynn and Stephen Pepper duetted on the Welsh number All Through The Night (Ar Hyd Y Nos). The concert finished with Waltzing Matilda starring Roger and Bob Ash.

In the afternoon we were back at St John’s for a different audience with a similar program but a different combination of soloists. Alex and Ken shared duties on Highland Cathedral and Bob and Roger led the amazing Waltzing Matilda at the end to a standing ovation for them and the choir.

Compèring duties for the weekend were shared by Drew Hopkins and Tony Davies with humorous but informative sections about Welsh hymns by John Evans.

It was indeed a great pleasure to perform in front of great audiences over the weekend – all were very appreciative of VicWelsh’s distinctive mixture of passion, musicality, warmth and humour.