WINTER LIGHT - Olga Vocal Ensemble’s First Christmas Album

Welcome to the Olga Vocal Ensemble community! We like to think of our music as a community, and in Olga's community, you can nurture our creativity and help us bring new music to your door!

Your support will ensure we can continue doing what we do - and we need your help to finish creating our first Christmas album, Winter Light.

We have faced difficult times because of COVID-19 - cancelled tours, postponed projects, and reduced audiences. In the summer of 2021, after a year of lockdowns, we finally managed to take Olga on tour again to the Netherlands and Iceland. But, due to ongoing pandemic restrictions, we had smaller audiences than usual. As a result, our resources for producing our Christmas album have been limited, and so we need your help to make it happen.

The Album

We are proud to present Winter Light, our first Christmas album.

The music of Winter Light spans traditional hymns, folk, gospel, and jazz, as well as featuring an original song by one of our members. The soundworld of the album is particularly rich - it features the five primary Olga singers, plus two former Olga singers as guest performers, plus the Reykjavík Boys Choir. The music has already been recorded (in July 2021), in a church called Reykholtskirkja in Iceland, and now we are in the process of editing the sound, creating artwork, and shooting music videos.

The album is being produced by Sigurður Rúnar Jónsson (aka Diddi Fiðla) and Pétur Hjaltested. We’ve worked on two previous albums with Diddi, and this latest album is sounding fantastic!

We look forward to sharing our music with you, and thank you so much for being part of our community!

The Songs

Winter Light takes you through the journey of winter, a season of cold and darkness lit up by togetherness and celebration. From the mysteries of the universe to the simple joys of a Christmas party, the album is a taste of all of Olga’s favorite things about Christmas.

List of songs:
Salvation is Created - Pavel Chesnokov

A Spaceman Came Traveling - Chris de Burgh

Hátið fer að höndum ein - Icelandic traditional

Corpus Christi Carol - Benjamin Britten

Adventide - Philip Barkhudarov (Olga’s 2nd bass)

Ave Maria - Franz Biebl

It Came Upon the Midnight Clear - Edmund Sears / Richard Storrs Willis

Ríu Ríu Chíu - Spanish traditional

Christmas Island - The Andrews Sisters

Go Tell It on the Mountain - African-American spiritual

Silent Night - Franz Xaver Gruber

Es ist ein Ros entsprungen - Michael Praetorius

The Singers

Olga Vocal Ensemble is based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Our singers are Dutch, Icelandic, English, and Russian-American. We formed in 2012. It started small, but we soon had our first show (at the Icelandic embassy in Brussels), then a debut in the Netherlands, and then our first tour of Iceland in summer of 2013. Since then, we’ve recorded 5 albums, toured Europe and the United States, and performed in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Harpa in Reykjavík, and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. We also adopted a red kettle. His name is Ketill Olguson, and he accompanies us on all our adventures.

The main five Olga singers are: Matthew Lawrence Smith, Jonathan Alexander Ploeg, Arjan Lienaerts, Pétur Oddbergur Heimisson, and Philip Barkhudarov. For Winter Light, we were also joined by two former members, Bjarni Guðmundsson, and Gulian van Nierop.

And of course, there’s the boys choir that joined us for two of the songs! Drengjakór Reykjavíkur (Boys Choir of Reykjavík) was founded in 1990, and their motto is: “Sing like angels, behave like gentlemen, and play like boys.” It was an absolute pleasure to work with these talented singers and their conductor Þorsteinn Freyr Sigurðsson.

The Plan

July - We recorded the CD tracks in Reykholtskirkja, Iceland.

August-November - Editing and mastering the CD tracks.

October - Shooting music videos.

November - Crowdfunding campaign, publishing music videos, and printing the CDs.

December - We'll send you the Winter Light albums.

Stay tuned on our social media for updates about our crowdfunding campaign.