The Inishowen Gospel Choir.
THE Inishowen Gospel Choir has a long-standing relationship with the Earagail Arts Festival and for its 25th year it has a very special performance in store at the Regional Cultural Centre in Letterkenny on July 21.
The festival has a great reputation of bringing acts together for special collaborations and this year is no different as they present The Inishowen Gospel Choir with The Stut Choir travelling all the way from Utrecht in the Netherlands.
The result of an ongoing international exchange programme, the two choirs will share songs and tradition through the universal language of music.
Inishowen Gospel Choir’s manager Yvonne McFadden said the exchange with the Stut Choir came about thanks to the assistance of Lorna McLaughlin of the Henry Girls.
Henry Girls
“The Henry Girls played a gig in Amsterdam and got talking to the director of the Stut Theatre, who in turn invited the girls to come over to work with the Stut Choir. Lorna thought it would be a great idea to invite us to do an exchange with the Stut Choir.”
Before their collaboration on the closing night of this year’s Earagail Arts Festival, the Inishowen Gospel Choir will be travelling to Utrecht.
“We will be going over there with the Henry Girls in June, performing at The 300th Anniversary of The Treaty of Utrecht on Friday, June 21, where we will hopefully be doing a couple of our own gigs, too,” said Yvonne.
Ahead of their concert in Letterkenny, the two musical directors of the Utrecht based choir travelled to Carndonagh to do a workshop with the Inishowen Gospel Choir.
Yvonne said: “They basically had us to talk about our childhhood memories and they went away and wrote a song about our experiences. The Inishowen Gospel Choir and The Stut Choir will be performing this brand new song at the Earagail concert.”
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