I love Holland. Anúna visited there for the first time in the mid 2000s, and after a number of experimental short-hops to the Netherlands I realised that I was hooked – hooked on the people, the landscape and the general sense of being part of the European mainland. With our excellent agent Peter Boone, I worked very hard to build and develop our presence there. This work culminated in 2010 with two highly successful tours, the most recent being last month [December 2010] – our first Christmas tour in Europe.
A Christmas show with Anúna is a little different to a standard appearance, being somewhat lighter in content, with well-known seasonal material juxtaposed on more familiar standard Anúna material. “Jingle Bells” sits quite happily next to the “Sanctus”, and “O Holy Night” compliments “Aisling” very nicely.
This trip was special also because it featured a large proportion of new singers to the choir – Tara, Hugo, Fiona, Daniel, Andrew, Aimeé and Victoria – these were joined by Anúna veterans Eunan, Miriam, Shane, Ronan, Rebecca, Elaine, Charlie and Rory. In total we were never more than 13 on stage, but were mainly 12. The average age of the group dropped dramatically, but I think we all gelled together pretty well. It helped that we had beautiful apartments with amazing heating systems each with its own private sauna. The snow fell consistently for the trip, generating a magical atmosphere, and produced one lovely image that I took overlooking a frozen lake.
The few hours we had each day gave us a tantalising glimpse of how much better Europeans do many aspects of Christmas than we do in Ireland. It is pretty telling that so many Irish people now travel to Europe to experience Christmas, but we have never had the cold climate in living memory that is standard on the European mainland. It simply isn’t possible to compete with ice rinks in the town centre, and glühwein to wash down a gingerbread biscuit from a stall under the arch of a medieval cathedral.
One of the best aspects of a tour with twelve consecutive dates is that you can try out things one day, move them on the next or discount them if they don’t work. As we don’t travel with a lighting designer our excellent sound-man Bryzze and I experimented nightly with new visual setups. We began by dictating exactly what we thought we wanted the show to look like, and ended with giving free-reign to the lighting technicians in each of the venues.
There were a couple of things that happened on this trip that stick in my mind. The day we landed at Schipol Airport was also the day I lost my voice. I couldn’t sing for ten of the twelve days, as I had a nasty infection sitting around my vocal chords. This meant that I had to ghost every note with the tenor beside me, in most cases Shane Sugrue or Daniel Mac Manus. It was torturous for me, but at least meant that the tenor line had some consistency, and my falsetto remained intact, which gave the guys a break on the high notes.
In the theatre at Bergen op Zoom we had a decidedly unwelcome visitor in the Hall… it turned out that the Stadsschouwburg de Maagd was originally a church. In twenty five years the bats had remained silent bar three appearances. Of the three times that the bats had decided to see what was going on in the auditorium one was for a performance of the opera “Die Fledermaus” [The Bat…], an event that made headlines all over the world, and another was our concert there. The bats flew all over the stage, and it is pretty difficult to be mystical and haunting when you are dodging small animals while singing, and being ignored by a full-house of people following the bats as they hope fervently that one of the singers would become entangled with an unwanted flying mammal.
Bergen op Zoom, Stadsschouwburg de Maagd
In Uden, besides having some of the most dramatic lighting effects imaginable created by our lighting man Rogier Janssen, we were also visited by our friends Omnia, one of Holland’s best-known touring groups. Omnia are never less-than vocal, and livened up the audience considerably with audience participation and loud laughter at my brilliant jokes. You can see their website here.
Uden, Theatre Markant, Lighting Design by Rogier Janssen
Thanks to global warming Ireland is now experiencing a European winter, however, as the chaotic mess that we went through to get home to Ireland unfolded on Christmas Eve shows, we are incapable of dealing with it. It was very depressing to see tens of thousands of travellers vanish from Schipol airport throughout the day, leaving a small group of tired and angry Irish voices wandering aimlessly through duty free watching planes get delayed by the hour every hour. Our jammed flight left six hours late, and we were lucky. We were traveling for around fifteen hours to get home, arriving into Dublin that night to be met with a city paralysed by a few inches of snow – impassable motorways, icy streets and terrifying journeys to be undertaken on deadly black-ice, However, this didn’t take from the many happy memories we had on the tour, meeting old friends and making new ones.
We return to Holland in January 2012 for our “Winter Songs” concerts – hopefully Aer Lingus, and Ireland, will still be functioning by that time, and if so, will have sufficient de-icer in stock for their aircraft to take off…
