Rufus Wainwright and 1,500 Singers Sing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”

Inter­est­ing. I did­n’t see one black face in the entire crowd. Sad.

Jeff Buck­ley, K D Lang and Leonard Cohen, in no par­tic­u­lar order, is way ahead of this ver­sion.

Agreed… the lack of diver­si­ty was dis­tract­ing, at best

Throughal­ly enjoyed it!

I thought this was fan­tas­tic! I LOVED it!
To all the naysay­ers: keep your neg­a­tiv­i­ty to your­selves. This is a week­ly choir that is diver­si­fied, allows any­one, young, elder­ly, dif­fer­ent cul­tures, & is aprox 1900 strong. To the per­son that “did­n’t see one black person”.…they are in this choir. Did you notice the cam­era was onstage & could only pan out to the first few rows of peo­ple sign­ing? Out of 1500? No won­der you did­n’t. They’re in the choir, just 400 were miss­ing that night & you did­n’t see every­one in the room.

that was an answer for everett

inter­est­ing per­fo­mance

Look­ing at any mid-range crowd shot (e.g. see 2:12), the eth­nic mix seems to be fair­ly close to the aver­age demo­graph­ics of Toron­to to my untrained eye.

Thank you Cathy. Very nice ren­di­tion.

“Who gives a shit?” (Re: the lack of black folks being present here)? Peo­ple who are blCk Nd peo­ple who love block peo­ple, THAT’S who “should give a shit!” If this song is thought of as wor­ship­ful at all, let it be authen­tic and ask our­selves why weren’t our black broth­ers and sis­ters rep­re­sent­ed here? We can do bet­ter and I hope Rufus et al do bet­ter down the road on this front.

Amaz­ing!!!!!!

my first, sec­ond, and third thought, too: a love­ly song, and how ter­ri­bly seg­re­gat­ed we are.

I too noticed that imme­di­ate­ly

As a reg­u­lar singer with C! C! C! And one of the 1500 that sang here, the diver­si­ty is what was made only be those who chose to par­tic­i­pate. I know a num­ber of gay folks in our group as well as Ara­bic and Jew­ish (the 2 lead­ers are both Jew­ish, one is also Japan­ese). Whether you saw any black or brown or abo­rig­i­nal peo­ple in the video is cer­tain­ly not inten­tion­al. All are wel­come to sing with the choir and a num­ber of black and Asian and gay and straight and.…… and.….. and.….. peo­ple do every Tues­day and Wednes­day evening and every chance we get to sing togeth­er! You don’t need a pass­port. You just need $5 for a lyrics sheet! You want to see more black, red, yel­low, green or pur­ple faces? Just bring yours. We don’t care what colour it is. We only care are you H, M or L? (High, Medi­um or Low voiced)

This moved my soul to tears the first and every time I hear it. Thank you.

You don’t get it, do ya? At least you know it was a stu­pid com­ment.

Bro­ken.

Phe­nom­e­nal! This song is beau­ti­ful. We are blessed to have it avail­able so beau­ti­ful­ly per­formed by many. I am so pleased to hear this ren­di­tion per­formed by many voic­es. How we will miss this won­der­ful man!❤❤

I could lis­ten to this all day long. Just beau­ti­ful!! And every­body looked like they enjoy­ing them­selves and were immersed in the expe­ri­ence. I’d love to be a part of a mas­sive choir like this. It’d be so much fun!!! And all the peo­ple I’d meet. What an incred­i­ble oppor­tu­ni­ty.