Coldharbour, Surrey

The Polish Choir, Ave Verum, will be treating us to a concert of Polish and English Christmas music. The event, which will include Polish Christmas traditions and "Polish treats" is for all the family and will be free of charge but a collection will be taken to help defray their costs - they are coming in a charabanc!

Ewa Kwasniewski writes as follows about the concert:

The Ave Verum Choir would like to invite you to an atmospheric and intimate evening concert of Polish Christmas traditions and Carols.  We have prepared a programme of both Polish and English classical and contemporary music and would like to introduce you to some Polish customs that are very specific to our country (for a start, the fact that our main celebrations fall on Christmas Eve)! For people who knew Marian Hemar and his work and who may have been to Fig Tree Cottage and experienced his hospitality and a Polish Christmas, this will be a sentimental journey into the past and our Polish language will once again fill the streets of Coldharbour. For those that haven’t, we hope that the warm, nostalgic and joyful style of our Carols will be moving and inspiring. Polish Carols are very different; there is often a focus on family and sentimentality. The mountain-folk for example sing lullaby’s to baby Jesus born in the harshest of winters, which is rather endearing!

As we all live in the UK now (and many of our choir members were born here), we will also sing some beautiful English Carols for you (and the concert will be lead in English) so please don’t worry about not understanding everything! The choir is comprised of many families and as Christmas is such a family time, we hope the event will be a warm, poetic and personal one and urge families to come along!

Here is a link to our website with further information on where we have previously performed and some background on the choir if you would like to learn more. http://www.aveverum.org/

We hope to bring some Polish treats to share with you all too, so you have a chance to ‘taste’ a Polish Christmas, as well as hear it! The title of our concert is ‘Koledy u Hemara’ which means ‘Carols with Hemar’

Many of you may remember that we have already performed in Coldharbour in October 2004 and we feel very privileged to sing here again, where Hemar is buried.