The Dubai Duty Free’s choral ensemble, the “Dubai Duty Free Nightingales”, has won the “Best Corporate Choir” at the recently concluded ChoirFest Middle East 2018 held at Dubai British School on 16th March.

The sixth edition of the ChoirFest Middle East organised by The Fridge, showcased top choirs in the UAE as well as international choirs from Iran, Lebanon and Jordan in a bid to win the title “Choir of the Year”, which ultimately went to the Tehran Vocal Ensemble this year. The annual festival celebrates the rich diversity of choral music in the region featuring performances by choirs representing company, school and regional groups.

The 25-member Dubai Duty Free choir features full time employees representing a number of different departments, among them Marketing, Finance, IT, HR, CSR, Display, Customer Service and Operations department.

Colm McLoughlin, Executive Vice Chairman and CEO of Dubai Duty Free said: “We are delighted that the Dubai Duty Free Nightingales won the Best Corporate Choir Award, making it their third win overall in ChoirFest. The choir put in a huge amount of hard work practicing for the competition and all of this is done in their own time. The whole company has been supportive of the choir for the last few years and seeing them win is a source of pride for us all.  Congratulations to the organisers of ChoirFest Middle East, in particular Shelley Frost and Joanna Marsh, who do a great job in hosting this special event!”

The “Dubai Duty Free Nightingales” undertook an extensive training programme for 32 days leading up to the competition where they performed three musical pieces of different genres, namely: the modern pop song “Rather Be” by Clean Bandit, a Latin praise song “Canticum Novum” (Sing a New Song) and a Filipino folk song “Ayug Ti Amianan” (Scenes from the North).

The competition was judged by three world-renowned conductors Peter Broadbent and Ghislaine Morgan from the UK and Ragnar Rasmussen from Norway.

Leading up to the competition the choir attended various workshops with some of the world’s top choral groups and conductors including  two members from Australia’s a Capella group ‘The Idea of North’ and David Lawrence, one of the UK's most versatile conductors who holds the Guinness World Record for conducting the UK's largest choir of 6,846 singers.

As one of the winners in this year’s competition, the choir had a special opportunity to perform their three winning songs at the ChoirFest Gala Concert on 17thMarch at the iconic Dubai Opera. As part of the evening, they also took part in the mass choral singing of the popular song originally composed by Irish-Norwegian duo Secret Garden “You Raise Me Up”, along with more than 400 choir members which was conducted by David Lawrence.

The Dubai Duty Free choral ensemble has participated in ChoirFest for the past five years and during that time has won three times:  winning the “Best Corporate Choir” twice (2015/2017) and the “Most Dynamic Choir” in 2016.