A chorus of young voices in celebration
VOICES will be raised throughout the Southland next week, many in unison.
Two choral festivals -- the first a one-day affair and the second covering three days -- showcase (largely) youthful performers from throughout the Southland, each sharing a fierce commitment to a vital and healthy future for choral music-making in America. Call it harmonic divergence.
“You can never have enough of a good thing,” says Grant Gershon, in his seventh season as music director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the conductor for Friday’s High School Choir Festival, which draws its participants mainly from Los Angeles County. “And this is a good thing.”
Says John Alexander, in his 36th season as artistic director of the Pacific Chorale, which next week resumes its American Masterpieces Choral Festival (dating back to 1986): “The more we can bring high school students into the world of professional choral music, the better.”
Now in its 19th season, the Master Chorale’s festival involves 900 students from 28 high schools who will sing a wide-ranging repertoire -- “everything from Vivaldi to a Piazzolla tango to a spiritual to Faure,” according to Gershon. The second of the two free concerts will find the students joined by members of the Master Chorale Chamber Singers.
The Pacific Chorale’s festival involves 204 students from 20 high schools who, for the fifth and final concert (all are free), are joined by some 300 church, community and college choir members, the Pacific Chorale and John Alexander Singers and more than 80 of the chorale’s alumni -- this being its 40th anniversary -- to form a massed choir of 500.
Alexander and assistant conductor Robert Istad, joined by composer-conductors Morten Lauridsen, Eric Whitacre and Alice Parker, have the students work on an all- American repertoire that includes works by Lauridsen, Whitacre and Parker as well as two other living composers (also here for the festival) and also dating back to William Billings.
“It’s an amazing feeling when you get together with others to sing,” Gershon says. “There’s no substitute for that.”
“That’s the reason we offer these festivals: to sing and create live music,” Alexander says. “This is vital to the future of classical music.”
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FESTIVAL FEVER
LOS ANGELES MASTER CHORALE’S 19TH ANNUAL HIGH SCHOOL FESTIVAL: Concerts at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Fri., Walt Disney Concert Hall. Free. www.lamc.org/community/ highschool.cfm
PACIFIC CHORALE’S AMERICAN MASTERPIECES CHORAL FESTIVAL: Concerts at 7:30 p.m. Monday, 9:45 a.m. and 7 p.m. Tuesday; and 7 p.m. Wednesday, Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Orange County Performing Artscenter. Free. www.pacificchorale.org/ concerts_and_events/ concerts.php?id=18
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