For the first concert of its 2019 season, MidAmerica Productions, as part of its 36th annual concert season, will present the Carnegie Hall debut of three choirs from Kansas.
Bradley Vogel, director of choral activities at Tabor College in Hillsboro, will lead an ensemble of more than 100 voices, including his own Tabor College Concert Choir along with members of the Wellington High School Crusader Choir and the Berean Singers from Elbing.
The combined group will present “Sunrise Mass” by contemporary composer Ola Gjeilo. The concert will begin at 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 17, at Carnegie Hall in New York City. The New England Symphonic Ensemble will serve as the orchestra for the performance.
“Both Jessica Coldwell, director of the WHS Crusader Choir, and Sara Morris, director of the Berean Singers, studied and sang with me at Tabor College,” Vogel said. “So our trip to Carnegie Hall will also serve as an unofficial reunion of sorts.”
“The Berean Singers are excited to perform for the first time in the Big Apple at Carnegie Hall,” Morris said. “We’re working hard to do justice to Ola Gjeilo’s inspiring music, and to do Kansas proud. Thank-you to the students, parents and Berean community for making this opportunity possible.”
“We have 30 students representing Wellington at this concert,” Coldwell said. “We are so grateful for our community’s support, and I am also truly grateful for the parents, students and community for believing in the choir. Thank you, Wellington.”
As for the material, Vogel said, “I find the ‘Sunrise Mass’ intriguing and appealing in a number of ways. I appreciate the composer’s journey of the sacred texts as moving from the heavens to the Earth — really the essence of God’s work for humankind in the incarnation: God to Earth. I chose it for reasons equally musical and educational — as something that would be a personal challenge for me, and for the choir, helping us both to grow.”
As a public thank-you for supporting the New York trip, the combined choir will repeat its Carnegie Hall performance of the “Sunrise Mass,” as well as Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” The performance will begin at 7 p.m. Sunday, March 10, within the Shari Flaming Center for the Arts on Tabor’s campus. A professional orchestra is in place for the concert.
For more information about the home concert, contact Vogel at bradv@tabor.edu or 620-947-3121, ext. 1402. Anyone interested in attending the Carnegie Hall concert in the Isaac Stern Auditorium/Ronald O. Perelman Stage, tickets are $150, $100 and $50. They may be obtained by contacting CarnegieCharge at 212-247-7800, visiting the Carnegie Hall Box Office at 57th Street and 7th Avenue in New York, NY, or by going online to www.carnegiehall.org.