Press from Tolosa

Now that we have safely returned to the US, we can begin the process of wading through the press and invitations that we have received as a result of our win.

The day of the awards ceremony, we received two invitations to European Festivals in 2010.  The first, the Musique en Morvan festival, takes place in France in July of 2010.  They will package our participation in that festival with another French festival, the Vaison Festival.

We have also received an invitation to a festival in Bavaria in May of 2010.

We will be uploading our own video takes to YouTube, but the Tolosa Festival just uploaded our version of “Johnny Has Gone For a Soldier” this morning. The sound quality is very poor, so please wait until we’ve uploaded our own takes for a better look at how we did. (if you get the common error message “We’re sorry, this video is no longer available”, simply refresh the page and try again.)

The most current press from Spain can be found through Google News.  These are all in Spanish and Basque, so you may need to run it through a translator (google toolbar, if you have that installed in your browser, will translate automatically if you right click on the page and select “page information”).  In a few of the articles, the headlines are for the Cantemus Choir from Hungary.  They are mentioned as the main winners of the festival because they are the highest scoring amateur choir, which is automatically invited to the Choral Grand Prix.  We are not eligible for that festival because we are a professional choir.

We are in the process of sending out press releases to American newspapers and websites.  If you have any connections with media outlets and would be willing to give us contact information, we would love to hear from you.  Simply email stephen (at) antiochonline.com with the contact information and we will send a press release right away.  The more press we get at home, the better!

Thank you all for your help!  More videos and pictures are on the way!

Antioch Sweeps 1st Place for Vocal Groups

It is the best news possible.  Antioch swept first place in both the sacred and secular vocal groups for the 40th Annual Tolosa Choral Festival.  We could not be more excited or pleased.

At midnight, the lights to the large auditorium dimmed and they began announcing the winners of each of the categories.  They began with the “audience favorite”, followed by the childrens choirs.  Then, they announced the sacred category vocal groups.  When Antioch was announced as First Prize, we were all very happy and made all sorts of noise!  When they began announcing the 3rd place and 2nd place for the secular category, we became a bit nervous that we had not placed at all.  However, when they announced that we had won first prize, looks of shock and happiness were all around.

We received many compliments from the international panel of judges and festival organizers.  It appears we will be getting many more invitations for huge international festivals.

The bus ride home was filled with tears of joy and fun stories.  We shared the bus ride back to the hotel with the Cuban group, Exaudi.  They were extremely gracious and offered many congratulations.

It is now about 2am and we leave at 10am to sing for the finale as the winners of our categories.  After the Festival Final Concert and lunch in Tolosa, we will go to San Sebastian for our last concert in Spain.  We leave first thing on Monday morning and will be back in the states Monday afternoon.

Thank you all so much for following our blog throughout this trip.  We will update again soon when we have more pictures as well as some edited video from our trip.

Spain – Day 8 – Side Trip

Today was SUNNY, warm and beautiful. We had the entire day off, so many of us decided to take the 3.5km hike along the coast to the neighboring town of Getaria. We did some sight-seeing, had a great lunch, and got to sing a bit in the local cathedral. Because of the beautiful weather and scenery, pictures were plentiful today. So, I’ll let them do the talking from here:

Spain – Day 8

We leave at 8:30 this evening to go back to Tolosa for a gala reception and dinner for the choirs. After which, we will find out the results of our competitions. More later!