seasonal salutations to everyone on the board.
you'll have to imagine picture which accompanied subjoined times article-20th december :
December 20, 2003
Image of the week: King's Choristers
Aww, bless the little angels of the King’s College Chapel Choir, Cambridge. Here they lark about on the college court before performing a Christmas carols concert for local schoolchildren (who, uncouth wretches, probably just make fun of their soprano and treble ranges).
Like they care. The 16 choristers, aged between 9 and 13, are superstars. On Christmas Eve, Radio 4 and the World Service will broadcast live “a festival of nine lessons and carols” to an audience of 150 million, comprising such hardy perennials as Hark the Herald Angels Sing and O Come, O Come Emmanuel.
The King’s choristers have a workload that would make Britney pall. They’re auditioned at 6, and then, if accepted, have a two-year “probationary period”. Once in the choir proper, when everyone else knocks off school for the day, the boys have a daily practice, an hour-long service, and still homework to do after supper.
Stephen Cleobury, musical director and a cricket man, isn’t mad about them playing contact sports — the danger of ending up on crutches after a vigorous game of rugger could make their procession into church look a little messy.
On Tuesday the kids flew out to Amsterdam to perform. They have this weekend off. On Monday they pitch up at the Albert Hall. Come Christmas Day, when their peers are treading broken bits of Gameboy into the shagpile, they’ll be singing a Mozart Mass. They work full-time up to Easter, and go on tour in the summer. And these scrub-cheeked drayhorses are all paid the same modest annual fee.
Caroline Foster, their housemistress, claims the boys “are just really normal”: there’s no diva-ish stropping here. The worst it gets is calling chocolate chip cookies “dogpoos”, and ones with white chocolate bits “birdpoos”. And forget drugs. The biggest sin is an overindulgence in chocolate doughnuts — and they’re not allowed to drink fizzy drinks before a performance. “Like most boys, they just care about where their next meal is coming from,” says Foster.
But the choir — also made up of 14 choral scholars, predominantly undergraduates — isn’t totally devoid of intrigue. Even as they file into church for that big Christmas Eve concert, none of the boys knows which will be chosen to sing solo the first verse of the opening hymn, Once in Royal David’s City, live to the world.
Ten seconds before the performance, Cleobury signals the chosen one with his index finger. Choir Idol, then, by any other name.
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as a consolation prize - if you want - you can download a libera clip at this yahoo group.
"a new featured video here, a Christmas offering by the famous boy choir Libera. They perform `Twilight Is Stealing`, a song I myself had never heard until a few weeks ago, on the BBC's Songs Of Praise.
"You can download it from the files section.
"As it is in excess of 6MB, I split the video in two parts, which you need to rejoin with Splitter, a small program also available at this site."
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Boy Chior & Soloists site (Read 5,974 times)
