Our Spring concert was well received. We performed a variety of pieces including ,What a Wonderful World, Westering Home, the Humming Chorus from Madam Butterfly and Gershwins' Summertime. There was also an interesting Contrapunto which involved cats,dogs, cuckoos and owls!! There were a
lot of laughs learning this one! We also performed a new work by Phillip Cooke "Mystery of Light" and Phillip himself was in the audience. The evening was tinged with a little sadness as we said goodbye to our MD Matthew McVey, who is heading for Bury St Edmunds to take up a very prestigious post of Organ Scholar at St Edmundsbury Cathedral.We all wish him the best in his new position. This young man has a very bright future ahead of him, of that we have no doubt. He has been a wonderful MD and will be very much missed. Many thanks to all who attended our concert and we hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed singing to you.
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Ready to Perform our short programme of nature pictures at st mary’s church, carden place , aberdeen18/6/2023 We had a very successful short program concert of our Spring concert pieces) recently held in St Mary's Carden Place ,Aberdeen.
Our main Spring concert is to be held in Longside Parish Church, Inn Brae, Longside on Saturday May 27th at 7.30pm. The theme of our concert is Nature Pictures and comprises of a mixture of music across the years . Entry is by Donation (suggested donation is £5) Everyone is welcome to come and join us for this varied musical evening . We would like to welcome our new musical director Matthew McVey.
Matthew has played the piano since early childhood. He started organ lessons at the age of 14 and soon after was appointed as organist to St Ninian's Parish church, Nairn. Since moving to study music at the university of Aberdeen, he has taken on posts of organist at St Mary's Episcopal Church, assistant organist at St Mary's Roman Catholic Church, Associate organist at St Andrew's Cathedral and senior organ scholar in King's College Chapel. He receives organ tuition from Dr Roger Williams, MBE. Before becoming our musical director in September, Matthew was accompanist to Ugie voices from September 2021 until May 2022. We had a successful Christmas concert 'Christmas Through The Ages' Our accompanist was Dr Ben Marsden. The concert was held at Deer Parish Church, Old Deer. At present we are busy rehearsing for our Spring Concert further details of this will follow very soon. We have spent the day at Inverurie recording Ben Lunns new composition for Aberdeenshire Saxophone Orchestra and ourselves Ugie Voices. It has been a long road with Covid 19 being the cause of the delays in finishing this project. Today went well and the recording is now complete.
Our performance of this work along with a few 'extra' pieces will be held in the Acorn Centre, West High Street Inverurie On March 26th 2022 7.0pm - 8.30pm Tickets are priced £7.50@. Tickets can be purchased at the door on the evening of the performance or online by following the link: https://www.trybooking.com/uk/events/landing/25702 Ugie voices are finally back to rehearsing in person! It is so wonderful to see everyone in 3-D so to speak after so long with only zoom rehearsals. We have started on our Christmas program which includes a nice mix of secular and sacred pieces, including some Handel, Rutter
(of course!!) and even a song from the Polar Express. With all that I'm about ready to get the tree up. ha ha! As for our Adopt-a-Creator project, things are moving on. We had a joint rehearsal just before the summer break which went really well. I don't mind saying that this project was approached with some trepidation by choir members, as can be expected when faced with something totally new and dare I say a wee bit out of our "comfort zone" we were joined by the composer Ben Lunn, who , as well as being amazingly talented was such a genuinely nice person. Ben took us through a couple of the pieces, and also listened to our comments and took them on board. He rehearsed with Ugie Voices and then we joined the ASO, who were rehearsing in another part of the venue. That's when we got the best idea of how everything would come together and it sounded wonderful. There are still a few issues to work through, the main one being the balance of volume between voices and saxophones, but that's just a technical problem. We have set up another two joint rehearsals in October and November, so we are looking forward to that. By the way you may notice our very own MD, James Campbell, in his cassock, he had a very busy day, doing not only the morning but the evening services, fitting the rehearsal in between and there's quite a drive for him between the venue and home, bless him. We have now finished our zoom rehearsals and are having our summer break.
With many restrictions being lifted we are very hopeful that we will be able to resume face to face rehearsals in September. Covid restrictions will still apply as far as we know and we are looking at a new venue so we can keep social distancing as our present venue will be too small. We have begun an exciting project with Making Music, in collaboration with Aberdeen Saxophone Orchestra with pieces by composer Ben Lunn. We have now received the music scores for these pieces and are looking forward to it all coming together. |