Choirs from Urdd Gobaith Cymru in Wales and the University of Alabama at Birmingham will finally perform together in person, Monday, April 18, after their travel and festival performance plans were delayed by the pandemic.
In May 2020, the UAB Gospel Choir was invited to be the featured choir at the Urdd National Eisteddfod choir competition in Wales; then, the UAB College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Music was set to host the winning Welsh choir the following year. Due to COVID-19 travel precautions, those plans were canceled.
Now Côr yr Urdd — a national collegiate choir from Wales — will come to Birmingham to perform with the UAB Gospel Choir for a concert at 7 p.m. Monday, April 18, at UAB’s Alys Stephens Performing Arts Center. Tickets are $10; free for students. For tickets, call 205-975-2787 or visit AlysStephens.org.
The Côr yr Urdd will also perform at 16th Street Baptist Church and tour civil rights sites in the city.
“This is one of many things we have recently been able to reclaim from the pandemic, like our all-department PRISM concert and our concerto winners’ concert with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra,” said Department of Music Chair Patrick Evans, D.M. “We are delighted to be able to host these students, show them the history of Birmingham and join with them in song with an in-person audience.”
The UAB Gospel Choir is scheduled to be the featured choir at the festival in Wales in 2023. Through the partnership, Urdd members are learning more about the gospel singing tradition and experience of being part of a real gospel choir. Singing in Welsh for the first time was a challenge for the UAB Gospel Choir members; however, they embraced it and look forward to visiting Wales, Evans says.
Wales, known as the land of song, has an unequivocal strong and longstanding history with music. Urdd Gobaith Cymru is a national voluntary youth organization in Wales, United Kingdom, with more than 55,000 members between the ages of 8 and 25 years. Since its establishment in 1922 — to give children and young people in Wales opportunities to learn and socialize in Welsh — the Urdd has nurtured more than 4 million young people.