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Celebrating 75 — part 3

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Celebrating 75 — part 3
The Big Noise Youth Choir performs during the Prince Albert Music Festival. -- Submitted photo.

Submitted by the Prince Albert Music Festival

The Prince Albert Music Festival celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, and they’re doing so the best way they know how: with a gala concert. The concert will take place on Monday, April 24 at the E.A. Rawlinson Centre. Showtime is 7 p.m.

In building up to the gala, organizers caught up with some Prince Albert Music Festival alumni who will be performing. This is the third of five profiles the Daily Herald has published. We’ll publish one a day until the concert on Monday. Today’s feature is on the Big Noise Youth Choir directed by Lauren Lohneis. For the previous two features,

Big Noise Youth Choir — Directed by Lauren Lohneis

1. How was BNYC formed?

Big Noise Youth Choir is made up of 13 high school aged singers who are all part of the Broadway North Youth Company (hence our name Big Noise Youth Choir that shares the same acronym!). After music directing summer intensive workshops and fall productions such as Frozen Jr. and Beauty & The Beast Jr. with these awesome young people, I decided to put together a bit of an ad hoc choir project for the Music Festival. They all agreed, and Big Noise was born!

2. Tell us a little bit about the piece that BNYC will perform at the Gala Concert on April 24th.

The choir will be performing 2 numbers at the Gala Concert on April 24th. The first is a piece by the Finnish acappella vocal group Rajaton, entitled Weary In Well-Doing. It starts with a drone in the choir (a long held pitch) and a free metered soprano solo floating overtop, then breaks into 5-6 part harmony throughout. I have always loved this piece and I knew Big Noise was the group to perform it! The second piece is a 4-part acappella arrangement of a traditional up-tempo Zulu dowry song called Amavolovolo.

3. What’s in store for BNYC in the future?

Big Noise Youth Choir performed at the Rock Trout Cafe in March, and next we are planning to use our PA Music Festival scholarship money to do a recording session at Mosaic Music. We had so much fun this year that we’re already throwing ideas around for repertoire for next year’s Music Festival, so you definitely haven’t seen the last of us!