Back by popular demand, the Flin Flon Community Choir will return with a new Christmas concert this holiday season.
The choir will, like last year, not hold a live Christmas concert and will instead stream a show online on Christmas Eve. Unlike last year though, where performers could not sing in the same room due to then-tight COVID-19 restrictions, the choir was able to meet together to practice and perform, pre-recording the show. The performance that will be streamed later this month was done Dec. 4.
The show will feature mostly traditional Christmas fare and carols, along with Mark Kolt’s arrangement of Star of Bethlehem.
“Other than that, it's still the Irving Berlin, the Christmas songs - I'll Be Home For Christmas, Santa Claus is Coming to Town - the classics,” said Flin Flon Community Choir conductor Crystal Kolt.
Putting together even this kind of concert took consultation and constant planning, including frequent checks when provincial health orders changed. To be on the safe side, while all singers gathered together to perform, every singer did their part while wearing a mask.
Kolt said she had reached out to other conductors to see how they were navigating the pandemic and took notes from their approaches.
“It was trying to understand whether we could and how we could, just like everybody else in the world during these last couple of years, trying to figure out how best to do it,” she said.
“We’ve been rehearsing masked and performing masked as well. That was a big hurdle. We spoke with different chorus choirs, we spoke with a maestro in New York about what they were doing at Carnegie Hall and we decided on our own what we felt comfortable doing.”
The show marks the end of the community choir’s 25th year of operation. While the group was unable to mark their silver anniversary with a major musical like Mamma Mia, Chicago or Grease, Kolt wanted to have one final show before the end of the year and hopes the choir will be able to host shows and large-scale productions again soon.
“There was a big push for us to do something now because we wanted to mark the milestone of 25 years, even if it wasn’t ideal,” she said.
