Under warnings of torrential rain and storms, Cloud9 gathered on December 2nd for our Christmas Concert. While heavy, the rain didn’t deter us, or our large and enthusiastic audience. We all stayed dry and the irony of singing the spirituals Deep River and Didn’t it Rain wasn’t lost on us.
There were two notable milestones in this performance.
First was complex six-part singing concurrent with playing tuned wine glasses in the ethereal Stars by Eriks Estevals. This piece is now a firm Cloud9 favourite and induced both tears and goosebumps in some of our audience members. Secondly, we added Church Slavonic to the list of languages we’ve sung in with Bogoroditse Devo from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All Night Vigil.
We loved singing some of our other favourites: Seal Lullaby, Wherever You Are and the Cantique de Jean Racine among a variety of new pieces.
We were thrilled to welcome our guest performers, Hilary Taylor and Roger Heagney OAM. Hilary has performed with the Royal Opera, the Glyndebourne and Salzburg Festivals, the Victoria State Opera and Australian Opera. Roger is a pianist, harpsichordist, composer and choral conductor and accompanied Hilary in this performance including three of his own compositions.
Some of our audience members told us their favourite part of the concert was when Cloud9 spontaneously began quietly humming in the back row to accompany Hilary’s beautiful rendition of O Holy Night.
Enormous thanks to Gloria and Annabelle, Hilary and Roger and everyone in Cloud9 who worked behind the scenes to ensure this performance ran smoothly. We are immensely grateful to our loyal family and friends who braved the rain to support us. We loved hearing yet again that this was ‘our best concert ever!’
We are already looking forward to meeting again on February 1st to begin another year of creating beautiful music together.
JM, Cloud9 Member
Almost ready for showtime
Didn’t it rain!