Since Burns Night the choir’s been voting on their 5 favourite songs from our entire repertoire. 33 choir members voted, with over 50 songs receiving at least one vote. We’ll be singing our 10 favourites on Monday 15th February at our next singalong evening on Zoom. We’ll be singing along with recordings of ourselves from concerts and rehearsals – coughing, audience kerfuffle, wrong notes included. We don’t have recordings of some things and others are dodgy, but it’s the closest we can get to singing together at the moment!

Some members are unable to join the Zoom rehearsals and singalongs, so here are the tracks for you and them to singalong even if you cannot be there in person.

Update, 16th Feb: the above photo is a screenshot from the event, which was very cheery indeed!

The Peanut Vendor, Sunshine. Gilbert & Simons (10th in the list) – one of the first things we ever did sing in our taster sessions and we’ve brought it out a few times since then. We’ll be singing along with a recording from March 2019 – a concert in Longhirst Village Hall

If Ye Love Me, Thomas Tallis (7th on the list) – We made this video last year using a recording from Brinkburn Priory. summer 2019. We were entertaining the gathering guests at a wedding – most of them weren’t really listening as they were excited at meeting up for such a joyous occasion (you can hear lots of audience chat), but still, you can hear how much we love singing there. The video contains other bits of video made my Jamie’s Mum who was over from Australia at the time dressed in choir uniform being our roadie!

Northumberland by Gary Seward (=3rd on the list) The choir loves this song and arrangement (I did it!) and it’s one we’ve sung a few times. Gary will be introducing the song in true concert fashion!

Locus Iste, Anton Bruckner (=8th on the list) We sang this during 2018 as part of our Bus Tour “resonant repertoire”. This recording is the best we have. I think we didn’t sing it as well as the other two 19th century resonant pieces, and unlike them we’ve not sung it again. However, we obviously like it a lot, so should fix our mistakes and give it another go! This recording is from St. Michael’s Church, Felton, June, 2018

Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen (6th on the list) We performed this one at our Christmas concerts in 2019, but most particularly at the wedding of Rachael and Richard that same month – a surprise for Richard and almost all the guests from Rachael and her Mum Andrea, who’s in the choir. We don’t have a recording of the choir singing this, so Jamie and I have thrown together a version to sing along to, but it is Pentatonix’s arrangement that we will be channeling!

Abendlied, Josef Rheinberger (2nd on the list) We were going to be singing this again in 2020, but this recording is from 2018 where it was part of our resonant repertoire. We made this video last spring as part of our lockdown selection!

Skydancer: Ghost Of The Moors, Cheryl Camm (=8th on the list) I composed this one last year and The Bridge Singers made this video as its world premiere to be played on Hen Harrier Day Online 2020. The artwork is all from members of the choir too – one of best lockdown videos we think!

59th Street Bridge Song, Simon and Garfunkel (=3rd on the list). Another of the songs we’ve been singing right from the start. This recording is also from that wedding in Brinkburn in the summer of 2019. We also sang it in March 2020 at the memorial event for our lovey Kate – our last performance indeed. Her daughter told us that they used to sing it in the car when they were little and going off on their holidays – a happy song indeed.

Bogoroditse Devo, Sergei Rachmaninov (1st on the list)…and first by a big margin too. Again from our 2018 resonant repertoire, and this recording is one we made with Ally Lee at the end of that bus tour season. This is another of our lockdown videos from 2020.

The Parting Glass (=11th on the list) We sang this way back in our Magical Glass concerts in 2017 and made this video as one of our lockdown projects in 2020, all recording individually and then editing it together. The video also features at the start some of our glass orchestra music from 2017 as well!

You will have noticed that The Parting Glass was one of several songs 11th in the list. Lullaby Of Silences was =3rd on the list, but several other people declared that they it thought it was too sad for this particular singalong, so I made the decision to keep it back for another time and substituted this one instead, as it’s a good one to end the evening.

If you want to singalong with Lullaby of Silences and read the sad story of it, click here: Song Stories: Lullaby Of Silences