We were delighted to make our debut at the Gŵyl Gerdd Dinas Powys Music Festival this year. We would like to say a big thank you to the festival organisers for staging Spectrum Singers' a cappella concert and to our lovely audience for giving us such a warm reception in a packed out Parish Hall.

Our summer programme 'Air' offered a contemporary twist on the pastoral tradition, bringing an ideal vision of country life to our urban audience in the shape of songs about the natural world and its seasons, including a number of works by living composers, including Eric Whitacre, John Rutter, and Morten Lauridsen.

This year we’ve been collaborating with emerging talent Rosie Clements on a new piece composed especially for Spectrum Singers as part of Making Music’s Adopt a Composer scheme in partnership with Sound and Music and BBC Radio 3, funded by PRS for Music Foundation. We’ll be performing the piece for the first time at Dyffryn Gardens in July and it will be recorded by Radio 3 for broadcast later in the year. 

As part of the process of getting to know our adopted composer, we decided to tackle her only choral work to date: ‘I should probably mention that I hate sheep’, which she wrote as an undergraduate at Birmingham Conservatoire. Its Welsh premiere was the talking point of the night and earned flocks of new fans!

We're not at all sheepish in revealing that our concert alone raised around £200 in support of the festival's chosen charities: Dinas Powys Scouts, who need to raise money for a new roof on their hall, and the Teenage Cancer Trust, who provide care and support for young people fighting cancer across the UK. So in terms of fundraising, we even managed to outperform Only Men Aloud! Sorry, guys...

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