CityLife

Young @ Heart Chorus has real local relevance

THERE are a couple of things that their musical director Bob Cilman wants to make clear to me about the Massachusetts-based Young @ Heart Chorus, made up of amateur singers aged from 73-90 years of age.

“This was always an arts project, not some sort of a social services project. There’s nothing sweet about it.

“I think of myself as somebody making art and working hard at it.

“I think the chorus would feel like I was condescending if I wasn’t taking it seriously like that.

“We’re there to make something really interesting for an audience,” he tells me.

“And Young @ Heart, the film you might have seen (I have and it’s wonderful) only tells part of the story.

“That was about the chorus and its members and the songs we were doing then.

No Theater

“This show we’re doing for the Manchester International Festival is one of our theatre shows, a brand-new one which we’ve been putting together with our friends from No Theater.

"We did a show with them some time ago, which was a retelling of the French Revolution using the songs of Frank Sinatra.”

The new show, I know, includes songs by The Buzzcocks and Bruce Springsteen and will, promises Bob, “be very relevant to Manchester and your music.”

Intriguingly, although he’ll wax lyrical on the many and various joys of seeeing The Who live in the Seventies, he refuses to be drawn more on the subject of this World Premiere, beyond promising that “there won’t be any songs from Freddie And The Dreamers or Herman’s Hermits.”

Always good news, I feel.

End Of The Road from Young @ Heart and No Theater is at the Royal Northern College of Music from Friday, July 10 until Saturday, July 18.