Well, there goes another Cardiff Singer - and what a great week it was.
Just over a week after Cardiff had hosted the biggest sporting event in the city’s history, we had the pleasure of welcoming some highly talented competitors of a very different kind!
20 brilliant singers – some with their very young families in tow – arrived from various countries around the globe. And our prestigious judging also travelled from far and wide. The judges were certainly tested this year; with the startlingly good quality of the singing, none of their decisions was easily arrived at.
This year there has been an unprecedented volume of output across the BBC – the extensive coverage of the Grand Final taking over BBC Four, BBC Two Wales, Radio 3, Radio Wales and Radio Cymru – all still available on BBC iPlayer and the BBC Radio iPlayer app. And for the first time we’re posting long form content on our website, not just on the UK iPlayer, but also available free of charge to international fans of the competition wherever they may be.
I suppose we say it after every competition, but the talent of this year’s finalists was phenomenal, and any one of them would have been a deserving winner. 2017 was a year of quite a few firsts for us: we had our first-ever t winner; our “wild card” fifth finalist won the main prize title. And of course, we had our first Scottish and indeed first British winner in the superbly talented Catriona Morison.
Catriona, even while she was flying home first thing on Monday morning to her day job at Wuppertal Opera House in , has been inundated with national and international media requests, appearing on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune, BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, and in the Times and New York Times to name but a few!
Word has spread far and wide, and like wildfire, thanks to social media. Not only did her t Song Prize winner Ariunbaatar Ganbaatar receive a public congratulations from the Mongolian President but, following Sunday’s victory, Catriona was very proud to have received a tweet from Nicola Sturgeon and now there have been two motions in the Scottish Parliament congratulating her on her success!
