Van Gogh that Nazis looted ‘to fetch £7m’
traditional hymns, was recorded before the pandemic. Tracks include Les Miserables classic Bring Him Home, alongside musical numbers from West Side Story and The Greatest Showman and Welsh hymn The Lord’s Prayer.
Russian song Spaseniye Sodelal (Salvation Is Created) is a favourite of Dennis Williams, one of two founding members of the choir, who turns 90 in August.
“It’s beautiful and rich singing with deep harmonies,” he says. “It’s the same where you go towards that geographical area. Bulgaria has some excellent choirs.”
Den loves the choir as much as he did when he helped start it, aged 16, in 1947.
“Singing is so stimulating,” he says. “To hear good music is wonderful. I was always in the centre of the choir as back then the conductor put the youngest ones in the front row where he could reprimand us. The volume was behind me. When we were singing quality music, my hair used to stand on end.”
It was two years after the end of the Second World War when Den and his friends decided to form a choir in their North Wales village.
“It was a terrible time, there was rationing and the war was awful,” he says. “It left its mark on us.”
Still, community spirit was in plentiful supply. That year saw the inaugural Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod, a festival formed to promote lasting peace among nations through song.
Den says feelings were mixed, given that ex-soldiers in his village had returned with injuries. Organisers were nervous that people would snub the event. Their fears were unfounded. Fifty choirs performed, with 10 of them journeying to Wales from the European mainland.
The event now attracts 300,000 competitors and more than 100 nationalities, and is planning to go ahead in July in whatever format is allowed by Covid rules.
Den remembers that first event, sitting on the edge of a field listening to the mother tongues of different singers as they filed in and out of the marquee.
“There were beautiful Spanish dancers and I thought they were wonderful,’ he says. “You could smell their perfume.”
Stirred by the scene, particularly those dancers, Den and his friends sought to find the obligatory 60 performers required to perform as a choir the next year.
Finally securing the magic number, they wore white shirts and red ties until they could afford to buy uniforms.
It took them a little longer to master the 18th-century religious pieces.
“The Moravian Teachers’ Choir from Czechoslovakia were wonderful,” Den says. “You heard them sing and thought, ‘This is what we’ve got to do’, but it took us a long time to reach that standard.”
Hard work and perseverance paid off. Within two years, they had sung at Westminster Choir Hall.
They won their first competition 1954 and graduated to spots Llangollen’s evening concert.
The next year, a young Italian singer arrived in Llangollen from Modena with his father Fernando’s choir, and in in snatched first place. That singer was Luciano Pavarotti and the tenor powerhouse credited the experience with launching his international singing career. He vowed to return. That promise was kept in 1995.
“What a lovely guy, I will never forget his smile,” says Fron Choir compere and first tenor, David L Jones, 71. “It was another proud moment for us.”
Pavarotti, by then a big star, stayed in a local hotel, and even held an impromptu sing along in the car park with the Fron and Rossini choirs.
“He stood in the middle and directed all of us,” David says. “We all joined in but you couldn’t out-sing Pavarotti.”
David’s father was in the choir before him, although he never imagined he would follow in those footsteps, given that he was in a rock band as a teenager.
“My dad used to say, ‘What are you singing that rubbish for?’ And I would say back, ‘The choir is rubbish’.”
BUT then, one night, David decided to go along and watch the choir rehearse “to see what all the fuss was about”. The singers were in the middle of a soaring Welsh hymn.
“It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” David recalls. “To my eternal shame I never told my dad while he was still living. But I know that he would have been smiling down all those years later when the success came along, saying, ‘I told you’.”
The grandfather and retired prison officer says that being part of the choir has been a magical experience.
“I never gambled on just how consuming it would be,” he says. “Suddenly I found myself with an extended family of some 50 or 60 blokes and their ladies. It’s been a great adventure.”
Den, the man who started it all, adds that anyone is still welcome to join the Fron Choir on a six-month trial basis.
“Even if we feel they’re not going to be the best, we will still look after them. We never throw anyone out.” That is a true brotherhood.
●●Echoes by the Fron Male Voice Choir is released tomorrow, and is available from fronchoir.com
A VAN Gogh drawing once stolen by Nazis is tipped to fetch a record £7million at auction. His sketch, La Mousme, is the star lot of eight artworks on paper being sold by a British family to beat possible Budget tax changes. Their collection, estimated to raise £16million at Christie’s on March 1, includes works by Lucian Freud and Henry Moore. Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 reed pen drawing of a young woman, influenced by his love of Japan, was bought by Jewish banker Kurt Hirschland in 1920. He fled Hitler’s Germany but the sketch was stolen after the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940. It was returned to the family in
1956 and sold to London art dealer Thomas Gibson, inset, in 1983.
Mr Gibson, 77, and his three sons are selling up ahead of any rises in capital gains tax. He said: “It is almost certainly...the most significant drawing by Van Gogh in private hands.” La Mousme is a copy of his oil painting of the same name that hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.
The New York sale includes a painting by Rene Magritte (valued at £2.5million), a self-portrait by Freud and a 1941 work by Moore of two people asleep in the Underground – both valued at £1.7million. The record for a Van Gogh drawing is $8.5million – £5.3million at the time – for Olive Trees with Les Alpilles in 1999. £1.7m
Paper money...from the top, works by Henry Moore, Lucian Freud and Rene Magritte