First Annual Orlando Sings Choral Fest Announced

Orlando Sings is one of Central Florida's newest professional arts organizations and has already had an exciting and successful first season. Led by Artistic and Executive Director Dr. Andrew Minear, Orlando Sings serves as an umbrella organization for a family of singing groups including two professional ensembles, the Orlando Sings Symphonic Chorus and the Solaria Singers. This young organization has already had a great start to its first season with full and sold-out houses for each of the three concerts they have presented as well as a successful, sold-out gala fundraiser.

Now Orlando Sings gears up to end their inaugural season with a three-concert series in downtown Orlando; the first annual Orlando Sings Choral Festival.

"With thanks to the talented musicians and generous supporters in our community, we are excited to present the First Annual Orlando Sings Choral Festival. I hope our audience members will be moved and inspired by the diverse lineup of choral music presented in our world-class venues. The music is at times thought-provoking, and at other times exhilarating, gut-wrenching, or just stunningly beautiful. The themes of our programs are both universal and deeply personal, and we will be offering innovative ways for our audiences to make authentic connection with the ways these powerful texts relate to their own life experiences.

Over the years to come, the Orlando Sings Choral Festival will bolster Orlando's international reputation as a hub for choral music and serve as a creative engine for bringing new art music to life. I am thrilled to bring professional choral singing to Downtown Orlando and to share the marvelous music of this annual concert series with our city and its singers."

• Andrew Minear, artistic and executive director

The festival will open on May 26th with Orlando's own professional vocal ensemble, The Solaria Singers, presenting a thrilling and compelling program of choral music by Black composers in the Alexis and Jim Pugh Theater at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. Some of the finest and most well-crafted choral music ever written, much of this music has been historically excluded or ignored by classical music programs. The selections on Solaria's program include fine examples of non-idiomatic music by Black composers as well as Negro spirituals, always an audience favorite and a most beloved genre of American music. Composers include R. Nathaniel Dett, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Marques L. A. Garrett, Adolphus Hailstork, Moses Hogan, Undine Smith Moore, Zanaida Robles, André Thomas, among others.

We are thrilled to welcome the Mastersingers from Jones High School along with their director Andrea Green who will be joining Solaria for this concert.

The festival continues on June 9th at the First United Methodist Church of Orlando where the 75-voice Orlando Sings Symphonic Chorus, featuring the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra will present Maurice Duruflé's Requiem along with Andrea Clearfield's Tse Go La.

Duruflé's Requiem is one of the most powerful choral-orchestral works of all time. The composer takes ancient Gregorian chant melodies and organically surrounds them with harmonies and textures reminiscent of French Impressionism and even jazz. In addition to strings, trumpet, and harp, with this work we will once again feature brilliant organist Dr. Michael Ging who was featured earlier in the season on the "Joyful Beginnings" concert.

Tse Go La (At the threshold of this life), composed in 2012 and scored for double chorus, chamber orchestra and electronics was inspired by the composer Andrea Clearfield's fieldwork in the restricted, remote Himalayan region of Lo Monthang in Upper Mustang, Nepal where she recorded and documented indigenous folk music with Katey Blumenthal, ethnomusicologist and anthropologist. The people of this region, just over the border of Tibet, are ethnically Tibetan. Lo Monthang is one of the last remaining enclaves of old Tibetan culture. These songs are sung in the Mustang dialect of Tibetan. Under the auspices of the Rubin Foundation, Clearfield and Blumenthal recorded 130 songs that had not been previously documented. The songs are now part of the University of Cambridge World Oral Literature Project dedicated to the preservation of endangered languages. The recordings are also now in the Cultural Library in Lo Monthang, Nepal and the songs are being taught to Mustangi children in NYC as part of a new Himalayan language and culture preservation initiative.

Both of these pieces reflect on life in all of its stages from birth to final breath. The evening will be in dedication to the 49 lives lost in the Pulse tragedy and the concert will be included in the official Remembrance Week activities. Representatives from the One Pulse foundation will do a presentation and reflection before the concert begins.

The festival concludes on June 11th with the Orlando Sings Symphonic Chorus presenting Eric Whitacre's The Sacred Veil featuring UCF cello professor David Bjella in Steinmetz Hall. Premiered in 2019, The Sacred Veil is a 12-movement work and the most recent collaboration between Eric Whitacre and poet/lyricist Charles Anthony Silvestri telling a story of life, love and loss. Silvestri's wife, Julie, died of ovarian cancer at age 36 in 2005, leaving two young children. Including texts from Silvestri, Whitacre and Julie herself, the intimate, compelling score tells a story of courtship, love, loss and the search for solace. Although inspired by this extraordinary and moving friendship, the piece does not mention Julie by name and shares a very human journey -one that so many of us can relate to.

"The Sacred Veil may be the single most important musical contribution in our time, perhaps in any time, to a non-religious, as well as non-political - perhaps we might say non-teleological understanding of death and loss. Its length and difficulty may preclude it from inclusion in your average funeral, but to experience it in performance with 40 singers, or perhaps in recorded form, may be transformative for those whose grief, recent or deep-seated, has never completely found closure." - PeoplesWorld.org

This performance is the final concert of the First Annual Orlando Sings Choral Festival and concludes the Inaugural Season of Orlando Sings. An historic moment, this will be the Orlando Sings Symphonic Chorus debut in the acoustically exquisite Steinmetz Hall at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts.

PERFORMANCE DETAILS

• Orlando Sings presents it's First Annual Choral Festival

  • May 26th | Solaria Sings the music of Black Composers | Pugh Theater

  • June 9th | Duruflé Requiem and Clearfield's Tse Go La | First United Methodist Church of Orlando

  • June 11th | Eric Whitacre's Sacred Veil | Steinmetz Hall

• Tickets can be purchased online at https://orlandosings.org

ABOUT ORLANDO SINGS

The Orlando Sings Symphonic Chorus specializes in the performance of large-scale choral works. They sing music inspired by the many cultures of the greater Orlando community, classical masterpieces, thought-provoking new works and world premieres. Composed of choral musicians from diverse backgrounds and professions, this group of dedicated artists will be collaborating with chamber and symphony orchestras each season beginning with their collaboration with the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra for their inaugural concert on November 18th.

The Orlando Sings Solaria Singers is a professional chamber choir made up of the finest vocalists in Central Florida. Solaria performs fresh interpretations of the greatest choral works of history as well as the most adventurous, compelling, and meaningful music composed for vocal ensembles in the 21st century.

Orlando Sings is committed not only to performing some of the most well-known and widely celebrated works in the canon, but they are also committed to presenting and commissioning new works especially by diverse and underrepresented composers. Every Orlando Sings concert season will include works by composers from historically excluded groups in choral music including women and BIPOC. The organization strives to create spaces where artists can build an inclusive culture that values and celebrates the diverse voices and life experience of our community.

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