Birthday celebrations - past and present

Hello!

And welcome to the first ever blog post from Singing In… Sometimes this will be written by Kate, and sometimes by Pete. It’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever sit down together and write a post. We would never agree on how it should go if we tried!

So, what will our blog be about? Well, it will be a bit of an insight into what goes on behind the scenes at Singing In… It will include features on specific choir subjects like the key elements of a great warm up, how we choose repertoire, the process of putting a virtual choir performance together and so on. But it will also include Singing In… specific posts about us as a team looking at themes such as how we began, what music we love, our plans for the future…

This week it is Pete’s birthday. (Happy Birthday Pete!!!) The first year we were together, we went to Berlin for his birthday where we met up with friends of his and amongst other things, went to see the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in their AMAZING hall. It was a really special weekend of music and culture, friendship and food. We were having such a lovely time that we almost missed our flight home! Other birthday celebrations since then for both him and I have included going to see artists like Clare Teal, Kansas Smitty’s and Emilia Mårtensson (bit of a jazz theme going on there!)

Apart from a busker in Sheffield in the summer, neither of us have seen any live music since seeing Jamie Cullum at Sheffield City Hall on March 13th. His opening words were “Sheffield, I have never been so relieved to get on stage!” What followed was a wonderful evening of utterly brilliant music. I don’t know whether it was made better by the fact we all knew it was likely to be our last live music experience in a while, but it was a truly outstanding evening. A few days later the country was in lockdown.

So, back to Pete’s forthcoming birthday. This year there will be no live music outing, and in fact no outing at all apart from a walk around Oughtibridge, but there will absolutely still be music to help us celebrate (and cake, lots of cake!). We listen to music a lot at home and sometimes there is dancing too. This weekend will be no exception, and perhaps, almost as good as a live music gig to go to, is a new radio show from Clare Teal on Jazz FM. Even better than that, it’s back to a whole two hours (from a previously reduced hour at BBC).

And live music? That will feature in our lives again one day. And what a sweet day it will be to hear and experience that wonderful rush of exhilaration of being part of something bigger than ourselves.

Kate