Our biggest venue yet

The Easter weekend was, for me, a weekend of both exhilaration and disappointment. Disappointment because, once again, Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick failed to make it into the Classic FM Hall of Fame. But exhilaration, because Star Wars in Concert was fab! The O2 arena was an amazing venue and the orchestra – the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra - very slick indeed. (And with a nice line in sarcasm too: “Do you play all of these instruments?” one of our basses was overheard asking the percussionist. “No, we just set some of them up for fun” came the reply.) We were singing two pieces in three concerts, plus the sound checks, so we had several goes at getting the pieces right. We lulled the orchestra into a false sense of insecurity by being really quite dreadful at the first sound-check, but it was just the effect of a different conductor and an unfamiliar acoustic. Once we’d settled down we threw ourselves into John Williams’ space opera style with gusto, chanted through the Welsh-Sanskrit of the choral pieces to a demonic crescendo, while behind us on the giant screen Lord Vadar came into being! How exciting to spend a weekend invoking the forces of darkness.

We also got to meet C3PO himself, Anthony Daniels, who was the consummate professional and came to visit us unbidden to give us a quick pep talk. We asked him if we could get a group photo and he promised to pop back in the following day to do it, and was as good as his word. Unfortunately by that time we’d all forgotten about it. “Photo time!” he called gaily, striding into the dressing room. We all looked at each other with varying degrees of panic. Our usual photographer was out of the room - did anyone else actually have a camera? While his back was turned we compared mobile phone pixel counts and rummaged frantically through the pockets of all the choir members who were out having a coffee. How could we possibly confess to not having cameras for our important photo shoot?! Just as we were trying to rustle up a sketch artist and some charcoal, our efforts procured us four face-saving cameras. “Ratamah!” we all shouted into the camera with nonchalant grins, while Anthony remained blissfully unaware at the front. Phew, what a relief!