Welsh Association of Male Choirs Festival 2018

In 2016 we at Mansfield & District Male Voice Choir had the honour of being invited to join 20+ other male voice choirs to sing at the Festival of Welsh Male Voice Choirs, taking place at The Royal Albert Hall on Saturday May 19th 2018. Deputy Musical Director, Ian Grice writes 

The Association is mainly made up of Welsh choirs from both North and South Wales  but also including associate members such as ourselves and our colleagues from Snowdown Colliery MVC in Kent and the Oxford Welsh MVC.

We are now well into our busy rehearsal schedule with a visit on May 2nd from the  “ on the day”  Musical Director  Dr Alwyn Humphreys .

Some of us in the choir have experienced   Alwyn’s  magic when he conducts. We sang under his baton  in 2009 in London and 2012 in Manchester at similar events.

Dr Humphreys was the musical director of the  Morriston  Orpheus choir for 25 years and made them the amazing choir they are today. Alwyn’s  wife, Joy Amman  Davies is the current Director of Morriston (so still in the family , so to speak). Alwyn is now Conductor Emiritus to the choir, but also takes on guest appearances with many male voice choirs worldwide ,as well as being director of the Chamber Orchestra of Wales . Another of Alwyn’s jobs is being a TV presenter on S4C (Welsh language public service channel). He is the main host of the  Sunday evening programme Dechrau Canu,Dechrau Canmol, which is a very popular  Songs of Praise type programme. I never miss it – marvellous for picking up the Welsh hymns.

This is certainly an occasion you can set your eyes on for a targeted event to learn songs. We have old songs to revisit and new songs to look forward to as well as 8 songs in Welsh ,which with the help of phonetics and a first language member in Al Roberts we get off towards a fantastic sound.

We can only encourage members to get stuck in to learning and keeping up the enthusiasm. To you our visitors to our site ,you don’t have to miss out as tickets will be on sale through many travel tour companies at the end of 2017. Keep an eye out for this-  we will keep everyone posted!