Our Charity Christmas Concert

19th December 2023

It’s time to get the Christmas jumpers and Santa hats out again! Our ever-popular Christmas concert will be on Tuesday 19th December, at Polwarth Church.

Our Concert will be a community event, where we’ll be joined by children from Bruntsfield Primary School Choir, as well as our friends Black Velvet, and special guests Lickety Split and Forth Harmonic.

This is a free event in aid of charity.

Still some tickets left from the School or the Chorus.

The Greatest Showmen

We are delighted to announce that tickets are now available for our 2023 Fringe Show “The Greatest Showmen”.

Join us in celebrating a century of classic songs performed in glorious four-part harmony.

The Chorus will be singing songs made famous by stars including Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, The Eagles and many more.

We will be joined by two very special guests:

  • Our friends Black Velvet, featuring our Director Rosalind Johnson, Kate Porter and Carole-Anne Burnett, all members of the UK’s premier Ladies Barbershop Chorus, Forth Valley Chorus.
  • Limelight Quartet, 2022 UK Quartet champions

Venue 122: St Cuthbert’s Church, 5 Lothian Road, Edinburgh, EH1 2EP

Friday 11 August at 7.30pm
Saturday 12 August at 2.30pm and 7.30pm

Tickets are available from:

  • Chorus Members (Then we don’t pay commission and you don’t pay a booking fee!)
  • Venue 122
  • The Fringe Box Office
  • Eventbrite

Walter Dods

All of us at the Rolling Hills Chorus were devastated to hear of the death of our longest-serving member, Walter Dods. Walter had been with the Chorus for 27 years and was a big voice with a big personality to match. He will be deeply missed by us all.

He was a well-known figure in the wider Barbershop community, with contacts all over the world, and we have been touched by all the positive comments and shared memories on social media.

Walter is pictured above in 2020 when he was presented with a commemorative quaich to mark his 25 years as a Chorus member.

And in this picture you can see him as he was in 1995 when he took part in his first performance with the Chorus in Peebles.

As a tribute we would like to share this video of Walter performing at our Fringe show a couple of months ago. Walter had attended Harmony College 2022 as part of the Extreme Quartet stream, along with a number of other Rolling Hills members. Four of them performed one of the EQ songs, “Lost In The Stars” as part of our show, calling their quartet “Sequel”.

< Watch Walter and Sequel perform Lost in the Stars >

Performing again

It was great to be back taking part in the world’s biggest and best arts festival, the Edinburgh Fringe, in what is our 30th anniversary year. The thrill of singing in front of an audience is hard to beat.

And following on from our Fringe shows we have also performed in the beautiful and historic Rosslyn Chapel for EASA, the Ecclesiastical Architects and Surveyors Association, as a surprise to end their conference (see picture).

Then to top it all, we performed at the official opening of Edinburgh’s Saint James Quarter, only to find ourselves singing for Princess Anne!

Our next concert will be at Christmas on 13 December, at Polwarth Church, where we now rehearse. It will be a community event, where we will be joined by children from Craiglockhart Primary School, as well as our friends Black Velvet.

This will be a free event in aid of charity so please put the date in your diary. Further details will be posted soon.

Our Best Ever Contest Score !

We are absolutely thrilled to have placed 9th in the BABS – British Association of Barbershop Singers male chorus contest today with a score of 69.8%! We have improved our score by 3% and jumped up 5 places to take our place in the top 10. We are so proud of our achievement this year and we can’t wait to get back to rehearsals and start working on our Fringe show!

Click here to see our performance

The Show Must Go On

Tuesday night without a Chorus rehearsal would be unthinkable, but how do we do that when we’re all under household detention? “Let’s Get Together Again” online!

For the last several weeks we’ve been Virtually Zooming off to the computer in the spare room to meet up with our fellow Chorus members, without worrying about physical contact and PPE.

We’re honing our vocal skills, singing some old favourites and learning some wonderful new songs

Our current favourite is a beautiful 4 part arrangement of Billy Joel’s Lullabye. We can’t wait to share that with you, at our next concert (whenever that may be)!

Keep safe and keep singing!

Hark! Unheralded Singers!

On 30 November a group of Chorus members celebrated St Andrews Day by taking part in Fair Saturday at Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens.  We started with an unannounced performance in the John Hope Gateway which quickly drew an enthusiastic and appreciative audience.  Then two performances in the Gardener’s Cottage where it was standing room only.  The selection of songs from our Scottish repertoire was well-received, with a particularly warm reception for our Scottish anthem, My Homeland.    Ben Macpherson, MSP for Edinburgh North and Leith, was so impressed that he donned a Chorus gilet to be photographed with the Chorus!

Hark! An Unheralded Performance!

Ben Macpherson gets a special preview

New BABS Members

We have welcomed 20 new members into the Chorus this year, and in a busy rehearsal on 29 October we made time to present British Association of Barbershop Singers membership certificates to 13 of them.  Fittingly, the certificates were presented by Bill Harvey, who is both a founder member of the Chorus, and a past chairman of BABS.

Happy Diwali !

Saturday 26 October saw the Chorus in the Ross Bandstand, Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh, celebrating Diwali – the Festival of Light – with our friends from the Indian community. We performed a selection of Scottish songs, enthusiastically joined in the singing of Jai Ho, and finished by leading the large crowd who had braved the cold in a rendition of Auld Lang Syne.

Not content with that, most of the Chorus took the No 41 bus to Blackhall to entertain the members of the Blackhall Bowling Club after they had finished an evening of wine tasting, some of which they very kindly shared with us.

Comments from the audience included

“Loved listening to each of the songs”
“Powerful performances”
“Emotional at times”
“Great addition to the evening’s entertainment”
“I don’t think that there’s another Male voice Chorus quite like them”