News

Our friends in the Whitburn Band are celebrating their 150th Anniversary with a virtual concert on 27th June. See below and tell your friends …

Whitburn Band is delighted to announce it will hold an entire virtual concert with one of the world’s leading trumpet players later this month to celebrate the band’s 150th anniversary.

Mike Lovatt, the Principal Trumpet player with Proms favourite the John Wilson Orchestra and the BBC Big Band, will feature alongside the Scottish Open brass band champion on Saturday, June 27 at 7:30pm in a concert to raise money for food banks in West Lothian.

The band members have recorded eight pieces of music individually from their homes during the lockdown – including two with Mike – and after it is all edited together, the concert will be broadcast for free on Whitburn Band’s YouTube channel.


The event will be raising money for the West Lothian Foodbank, who are providing much needed help to the people of Whitburn and beyond during the coronavirus pandemic.


The virtual fundraising concert will be the centrepiece of Whitburn Band’s 150th anniversary year. The concert follows on from Whitburn’s ‘virtual’ performance of Stars and Stripes Forever, which has been viewed over 26,000 times online.

Charlie Farren, Whitburn Band’s Chairman, said:

“We are delighted to have the opportunity to perform our 150th anniversary concert despite the difficulties everyone is having just now. The band has worked hard to record all their parts individually at home, and everything will be brought together by the technical skills of our percussionist Ryan Bradley. We are delighted to have Mike Lovatt as our soloist. He is a joy to work with.
We are all looking forward to seeing and hearing the final product, and it is great that we can give a little bit back to our community by raising money for the West Lothian Foodbank.”

You can donate money here – https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/whitburn-band

Honorary Member of The Glasgow Phoenix Choir, Mrs. Rena Mooney, wife of the late Peter Mooney who conducted the choir for 28 years from 1955 – 1983, yesterday (15 June) celebrated her 100th Birthday.

Many congratulations and very best wishes to Rena from all in the Phoenix Family.

 

The fourth programme in our Virtual Concert Hall series is now available and includes two items in tribute to our former conductor, Peter Shand, who sadly died recently.

Why not pay a visit to our Virtual Concert Hall and catch up on the latest programme. Make yourself comfortable, follow the link here or under the “Concerts” tab at the top of the page and enjoy our latest virtual offering. We hope to see you soon.

It is with great sadness that we have learned of the death of Peter Shand, a former Conductor of The Glasgow Phoenix Choir.

Peter was conductor of the choir from 1986 to 1991 and it is he to whom we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude for recruiting a young Cameron Murdoch, as our accompanist in 1987.

 

In his time with the choir, Peter broadened the choir’s repertoire with pieces ranging from Scottish renaissance music to Russian folk songs and took the choir to perform at the Glasgow International Jazz Festival, the Glasgow Garden Festival (seven appearances),
and the International Music Festival
in Missoula, Montana, USA.

 

 

 

The Glasgow Phoenix Choir sends its deepest condolences to his family and friends, including our own Cameron Murdoch. He will be much missed by all who knew him.

While the lockdown and social distancing measures currently in place, to combat the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, make it impossible for us to bring you our regular programme of live concerts we are pleased to announce that we have created a ‘Virtual Concert Hall‘ here on our website that will draw on our back catalogue of recordings to bring you a virtual concert that you can join at a time that suits you and you can listen to as much or as little as you wish.

We hope you will join us soon and you can do so by following this link or clicking on ‘Virtual Concert Hall’ under the Concerts tab on the menu bar above.

Your feedback, comments or requests are welcome and you can email us here.

Due to restrictions now in force in the UK to tackle the coronavirus outbreak, the Glasgow Phoenix Choir has suspended all rehearsals until further notice.

All choir concerts / events scheduled from now (18 March 2020) until the end of June 2020 have been postponed / cancelled. Please refer to our Events page for details.

The safety of our members, audiences and staff at concert venues is paramount.