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The British Club was rocked once again by the sounds of music on Friday. The Manama Singers held their last concert of the season, Summer Splash, in the Windsor Room.
It was final in more ways than one as the lovely musical director Mary Vaillancourt is leaving Bahrain for Moscow in a few weeks’ time.
Billed as a celebration of summer, it was a delightful trip down memory lane for most of the audience and not a few of the singers!
With only 44 singers and Jill Laping on the piano as the accompanist it could well have been a ‘wet summer event’, but once again the Manama Singers pulled it off with precision timing, emotional singing and a love of doing what they do best.
From the opening notes of Corner of the Sky by Steven Shwarz, from the Broadway musical Pippin (which yes, no one I know has ever heard of either),they held us firmly under their spell.
Next up was the incredibly moving Yesterday by Lennon and McCartney. All the arrangements throughout the show were complex and designed to show off the vocal skills of the choir to the optimum .They did not disappoint for one minute.
From there straight into another Beatles classic The Long and Winding Road, which they toned down considerably from the original in order to not only return it to its McCartney-inspired roots but to give them free reign with their voices.
The McCartney/Lennon trilogy was completed with Here, There and Everywhere, which I have to confess is my favourite love song of that era.
Then the entire force of the concert changed as they rolled into the glorious classic arrangement of Stand By Me by Roger Emerson. Best known for Ben E King’s version, the Manama Singers made it their own.
The tempo changed and voices were tempered for the gentle Once Upon a Time from the Broadway musical All American and, then, when we thought we had heard the best, came Mark Hayes’s glorious arrangement of Paul Simon’s The Sound of Silence.
We sat transfixed in our seats as their voices rose and fell in counter-point with delicate precision and just when I thought they were going to let me down, there it was, just for one or two phrases … the amazing Manama Wall of Sound!
Straight from there into another Hayes arrangement, Bridge Over Troubled Water and we were off into an emotional vortex of wonderful words and singing.
The closer was the complex and delightful Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (arranged by Mark Brymer) sung with great gusto and verve by all concerned and lapped up by the audience.
Suddenly, and all too soon, it was all over until next year; leaving us begging for more. We did get a quick encore of Stand By Me but we would have been happy to sit through the entire concert again!
The Manama Singers did what they do best and we loved it.
– Christine Hasan
