The Festival of Village Carols Goes Virtual
Saturday 28th November 2020, Grand Sing 7.30pm – 11.00pm
We’ve been thinking long and hard about the sad loss of our festival this Christmas and feel that we should raise our voices and sound our instruments in a Virtual Grand Sing. The big difference is that we will have no chairs to shift, cups of tea to make, lunches and teas to sort, ticket sales to manage, etc! But we will have plenty of carols to sing and guests to listen to!
The Virtual Grand Sing will feature many favourite local carols from South Yorkshire and North Derbyshire plus special guests, using Zoom, Facebook and YouTube.
Our Guests will include a feast of solo carollers including
- Will Noble, Rosie Hood and Manny Grimsley from the Royal at Dungworth
- John Fowler from the Blue Ball at Worrall
- Peter Bearon and Alison Whitaker from the George at Upper Denby
- John Bowden from the Black Bull at Ecclesfield and the Old Red Lion at Grenoside
- Sebastian Stone from Great Longstone.
- Parti Bronheulog, Plygain Carol Singers from North Powys, Wales
- And Rhiannon Ifans and Trefor Pugh, also from Wales
Parti Bronheulog was never formed, but like Topsy it just grew. In the 1930s at Bronheulog, a farm near Oswestry, six children sang together. Their father, who had died in 1926, had been a singer, and the children (fathers, uncles and aunts of the present party members) inherited his musical talent. The parti now consists of a family quartet, who sing traditional Welsh plygain carols in three-part harmony, Gareth and Peter and their sisters, Lynda and Rhian.
The Festival of Village Carols is a celebration of the remarkable carol singing traditions that flourish in the villages around Sheffield and beyond. During the evening there will be the opportunity to join in with fourteen or more of the favourite local carols plus the choruses of the solos.
The carols for all to sing will include:
- ‘Awake Arise Good Christians’
- ‘Hark Hark! Hark Hark!’
- ‘Liverpool’
- ‘Back Lane’
- ‘Jacob’s Well’
- ‘Joy to the World’ (Foolow)
- ‘Curly Hark’ (Eyam)
- ‘Peace o’er the World (Castleton)
- ‘Mount Zion’
- ‘Old Foster’
- ‘Star of Bethlehem’
- ‘Portugal’
- ‘Mount Moriah’
- ‘Merry Christmas’
They are all included in either The Sheffield Book of Village Carols or The Derbyshire Book of Village Carols. There’ll also be one or two surprises!
Please register to reserve a place and you will receive a free set of words. Please register your place by filling in the form below:
https://forms.gle/WJgtZUaUjPtrMKrs9
If you require the music scores, these can be emailed as a pdf at a cost of £3.50. Please order from http://www.villagecarols.org.uk/publications/virtual-grand-sing-music-book.html.
Donations to the Festival of Village Carols will be gratefully received via PayPal. After overheads have been covered, the surplus will be donated to Weston Park Cancer Charity in memory of Chris Lowry, a much-missed former member of our festival committee.