I sang in the choir again last night, and it was so good to meet up with friends from last year, and some new ones I've met this year. We met, not in our usual venue at "Gliesmaroder Thurm Gasthof," (the garden is flooded) but in a room in a very smart residential care home, which looked more like a hotel. We are preparing for a festival of singing in Thune, a small village just outside Braunschweig. The two day programme can be seen to the left, but we are singing on Saturday June 15th only. "Scheunenfest" translates as "Barn Festival," and we will sing on a stage in a huge half-timbered German barn, with its great overhanging roof, used for the protection of farmers and animals in inclement weather and heavy snow.
We are singing a programme of four songs. The first "Butterfly," is sung in German, but with an English refrain. We are attempting to sing the second song, ""Kad si bila mala Mare," a Dalmatian song, in Croatian. The third song entitled "Pavane" is sung in French, and the fourth, "In Vino Veritas," will be sung in Latin, although I have not yet seen a copy of the music. We are finding the French song very difficult to pronounce, and all agree that it is so much easier to sing in English and German!
Three out of our four pieces of music.
After the choir practise, a small meeting was held to elect a new chairperson for the choir. The present chairman and his wife are moving to Nordrhein-Westfalen to be nearer their children, and they will be sadly missed. Claus plays the accordion, and last year we went out into the woods and sang German songs to his accordion accompaniment. We sounded very good, but many of us had to drink beer, the medicinal type of course, in order to improve our voices.
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