Food was to the fore at Hallow Church on Saturday 15 June both literally and in song as Oakville Singers performed a concert in aid of Worcester Foodbank.
Two sets of songs with a mix of classical and modern set the tone for a joyful evening of music accompanied by wine and soft drinks. Music by Stopford, Rutter, Parotta and Karl Jenkins showed the Choir’s four-part harmonies at their best while musical director, Ivan Oliver included some corny jokes in with his introductions!
Arrangements of Born Free, Over the Rainbow and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah were more familiar to the audience and a rousing rendition of Food, Glorius Food from Oliver made an appropriate end to the first half as the audience were invited to make donations for the work of the Foodbank. As a new choir member and a Foodbank volunteer, Paul Clarke described the important welfare work of the charity and shared the mixed emotions with which he and other volunteers viewed their efforts.
The second half of the concert raised the emotional level with a beautiful pastoral setting of a piece by Walter de la Mare called simply ‘Music’ and a four-part rendition of ‘Wherever You Are’, put together by Gareth Malone and Paul Mealor for the Military Wives’ performance at the Remembrance Day Concert in 2011. To match the stream of jokes from the conductor’s repertoire, the Choir added humour of their own with versions of ‘Old Macdonald had a farm’ and a political satire from the pen of John Rutter warning of the risk of voting in a scarecrow as a senator, ‘The terrible tale of Tom Gilligan’.
The concert finished with ABBA’s ‘Thank you for the music’, an appropriate sentiment for the evening and the audience response was both enthusiastic and generous. The concert generated a car load of food and donations worth nearly £500 for Worcester Foodbank.
