On the Saturday afternoon of the IW Festival The Medina Choir will be performing with and backing Woodstock legend, Melanie Safka.
Melanie, will be flying in from Nashville, Tennessee. The Medina High Community Choir have joined forces with the Medina High School Choir and been asked to perform.
Following their performance at The Anvil, Basingstoke in April, where they competed against some of the most prestigious choirs in the country in the national BBC3 Choir of the Year competition, the Medina High Community Choir will now perform to an audience of 50 Thousand +.
Recently they attended a choral masterclass with the Director of Music for the Royal Marines, Major Anthony Smallwood, and now the MHCC have increased their rehearsal schedule to two and sometimes three times a week so they are now more than ready to embrace the exciting opportunity of singing on the main stage.
Medina Choir will be backing Melanie’s two songs, Ordinary Rain, written in support of the victims of the recent Nashville floods and Lay Down (Candles in the Rain) - famously sung at Woodstock in 1969.
Some of the Community Choir's members remember Melanie performing at the IW Festival in 1970 when she sang at 6.30am!
Choir director, Hannah Brear, who originally founded the community choir in 2006 to enable parents, carers, grandparents and siblings of Medina High School students to sing together is really excited by the progress the choir has made in its relatively short life. She said, “We started with only 4 members, but since we opened our doors to the Island community we have gone from strength to strength and now have over 80 members aged from 8 to 80! Despite the fact that many members don't read a note of music, passion, dedication and commitment from all involved has meant that we are now able to sing the kind of complex arrangements and close harmonies that are sung by professional choirs.
When I entered our choir into the BBC3 Choir of the Year competition, I simply thought it would be a brilliant opportunity for a community choir like ours to get to sing in such an amazing performance venue. It was also great to have the opportunity to go with Richard Wiseman, assistant choir director and accompanist, to London in November 2009 to work with the BBC Singers and some of the finest choral conductors in the country. I am just so proud of my choir and what we have achieved together.
When I received the phone call asking me if we would be prepared to sing at this year’s festival, I couldn't believe my ears. It will be a great opportunity for all our singers and fantastic to work collaboratively with the school choir once again.”
There is a busy season ahead for the choir with its main concert at Medina Theatre on Tuesday 20th July - "Showstoppers from the Stage and Screen". Then, during August, the choir will be going on its first major tour to Brittany, France. Members are busy fundraising to subsidise the tour costs. A recent 10-hour choir singathon raised over £1000 to enable families who would not otherwise be able to go on tour to take part in this venture.