WOV Sydney & Chatswood at Parliament House NSW

August 28, 2018

SYDNEY AND CHATSWOOD CHOIR’S STELLER PERFORMANCE AT NSW ADR AWARDS GALA DINNER

On the evening of Friday 10th of August the choirs from Sydney and Chatswood came to together at the NSW Parliament House’ to perform a four song repertoire in the Strangers’ Function Room for guests the annual Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR) awards gala dinner.

The Australian ADR Awards recognise both individual and team excellence in the area of Alternative Dispute Resolution.  The critical feature of the ADR is that it marks out alternative dispute resolving mechanisms from regular court systems. Of note was the involvement of Sir Laurence Street who opted to use his knowledge of the law, his connections and his authority to help the early years of ADR development.

The Sydney choir under the leadership ship Robert Teicher and the Chatswood choir under the leader ship of Liz Lecoanet worked their choirs individually perfecting the performance in the lead up weeks to the event. Both choirs came together on the Tuesday before for a final combined practice run at the Sydney’s Choirs residence in Pitt street Sydney.

On the Friday, around 60 members from both choirs gathered in the green room at Parliament house for a warm up, some light refreshments, and to shake off the nerves.

At 7pm we took out place on the stage and once the dinner guests were we seated, with Robert on piano and Liz conducting, we opened with a magnificent solo operatic performance by Christine Varricchio singing the first two lead in verses of the traditional New Zealand love song ‘Pokarekare Ana’ with the full choir joining Christine from verse 3 onwards. The audience were stunned at the talent of Christina!

Our next number was a Bobby Darin classic the ‘Simple Song of Freedom’ and while it is fair to say we performed a fantastic rendition, it was our ‘freedom’ chant at the end of the number that lifted the roof.

Our third performance was ‘This Is Me’ from the recently released movie musical ‘The Greatest Showman’. We had all worked particularly hard on this during our Tuesday night practice secessions and with tricky timings to master we were still perfecting up until the last minute in the green room. The saying “it’ll be alright on the night” certainly came true here. Pitch, notes, and tempo were spot on and we were entitled to a little self-congratulations on how well be belted this out.

At the end of ‘This Is Me’ we went straight into a fun and livery rendition of the Monkeys classic ‘Cheer up sleepy Jean’ and without too much encouragement had the dinner guest clapping and singing along. We left the stage with big smiles and a rapturous applause from our audience.

Robert stayed through the evening to play some dinner music and reported back at the following Tuesday practice that he had receive great praise on our performance from many of the  esteemed guests. We had great fun and are looking forward to a chance to sing again at a public event with one voice!

Brian Wardrop