Northern Stars
Northern Stars Chorus is the first mixed barbershop chorus in the Nordic countries. Rasmus Krigström is Musical director. Northern Stars were 4th place bronze medalists in the World Championships held in Louisville, Kentucky in July 2023, and the first mixed chorus to receive a medal on the international stage. We are also reigning European champions as well as reigning SNOBS chorus champions! What a whirlwind of time we have had since our start in2019... ! The journey didn ́t even start until it was cancelled...our first goal was to compete in Germany at the 2020 BinG! Convention was cancelled when Covid hit the world. We kept going with distant rehearsals and new plans were formed. Our first contest, and debut, was in Helsingborg in 2022, where we won with an 88.8 average. We won gold medals in both European and SNOBS chorus contests. On to the SNOBS 2023 convention in Kalmar, we debuted our current contest material, the story about what lies “Beyond TheYellow Brick Road”, (see detailed description below) songs arranged by Clay Hine and Rasmus Krigström. In 2025 we are eager to defend our titles at the upcoming joint European and SNOBS convention and in July we will represent SNOBS at the International convention in Denver. We are currently working on new really exciting conceptual contest material to be performed 2025. The full conceptual story about "Beyond The Yellow Brick Road" was created by the chorus creative/visual team, and in short is a modern twist on the stressful world we seem to live in, looking for success and money but always feeling a pressure coming from all directions in daily life. The first medley starts on a happy note and we climb the ladder of success, and both musically and visually this continues over to song two that starts even more happily, almost crazy, and this is where things start to go overboard. The intro surprisingly ends with a crush, we hit the wall mentally and we break down totally. The demons that hunt us in our daily life has won, it seems. Then we start realizing that all the gold we were looking for isn ́t the big prize or reward of life. We look into ourselves and find the deeper meanings and realize the way to real happiness is by letting everything from the outside go and listen to ourselves and find our own way to enjoy life. This is what lies beyond the road paved with fake gold and fake happiness. Our goal is to convey this message to all of you.
