Irish music in the basilica

On Wednesday night I had a bit of a late one for a school night. Our Irish band had been asked to play a piece or two at the Christmas Carol Service of a colleague's church. We agreed that accordion, low whistle and guitar would go along, and so without much practice due to other commitments, we took a car from Maadi to the Basilica of Notre Dame in Heliopolis.

"The Basilica is in the historical heart of Heliopolis. Modeled on Istanbul’s Aya Sofya and its Byzantine style, it is affectionately known as the “Jelly Mould”. The interior has its own riches, stained glass windows, a large organ from Belgium towers over the congregation while granite pillars floated from Aswan provide the foundations for the light filled unadorned dome."

It's a beautiful church - very Coptic or Orthodox in its style and iconography inside, but is a Catholic Basilica. The organisers kept apologising for the poor acoustics. We didn't agree - the huge dome directly over where we were playing created a phenomenal reverb, and the low whistle in In The Bleak Midwinter was truly haunting. We segued from that into a slow verse of In Dulce Jubilo before picking up the pace and sprinting through it again before a key change from C to G twice. From there we moved straight into a couple of up-tempo run-throughs of Christmas in Kilarney a couple of times, for which low whistle was switched to bodhran.

We played really well - especially considering we'd barely practised - and lots of people came up to us at the end of the service to ask about gigs. The highlight for me, though, was the Choir of the Religious Family of the Incarnate Word who performed some amazing latin choral pieces.