A glare of publicity

After the jollies of our tour to Spain last week, we were back into serious business this weekend just gone, with a gig at a charity gala at Hampton Court Palace, in aid of Marie Curie Cancer Care and the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation. I was hoping aloud last week that we might get some good celeb spots, and we certainly weren’t disappointed. We got glared at by a veritable panoply of stars! I don’t think they were actually intending to glare – I think they were either trying to look sultry and interesting or were just being distracted from their conversations by the brilliance of our music. And the music was indeed brilliant. We performed a wide variety of difficult pieces in the non-existent acoustic of the garden, and did a superb job of the lot of them, so we were very proud of ourselves.

The gala was sponsored and hosted by Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of Stud House, in the grounds of Hampton Court. We were singing in the garden, and then briefly in the marquee as the guests were coming in to dinner. Unfortunately the traffic was so bad on the way to Stud House that we were very late arriving and had to hussle through our sound check in the marquee. While we were trying to work out the practicalities of squashing us all in front of the small stage, a band arrived on the stage behind us, and we looked around to see Simon le Bon patiently waiting for us to finish. I nearly fell over. When I was 12 I used to love him! He was most gracious about us hijacking his soundcheck though, and didn’t glare at us at all, so now I love him even more.

So who was glaring? Well, Alan Rickman apparently glared quite intensely at us for a while although I completely missed it, which is annoying as I would have loved to have been glowered at by him! I was however glared at directly by David Walliams, so that makes up for it a little. Sophie Ellis-Bextor also looked grumpily in our general direction, although she might just have been wondering whether you could put a dance beat under Whitacre’s “Sleep” (I think that would work).

The non-glarers grabbed our attention more though. Mikhail Gorbachev didn’t wince once at our rusty Russian during Rachmaninov’s Vespers, and there’s a very fine line with Russian between getting it right and sounding like Lloyd Grossman, so his forbearance was appreciated! Hugh Grant came up and laughed openly at us when, dressed in our English black tie finest, we broke into Mike Brewer’s arrangement of a Zulu Freedom Song. And everyone’s favourite celeb, Vanessa Redgrave, came and listened with enthusiasm for a while and actually wandered into the alto section at one point to see what music we were singing. She was kind and appreciative and lovely in every way, and is reputed to have said “This is a real choir”! Vanessa, a free ticket for you to our next concert at Southwark if you want to see what we can REALLY do.

So another weekend of excellent performance is over, and excitingly we actually have a weekend off this coming weekend, so the blog will be back to its usual end-of-the-week timeslot next week.