Exciting concerts on the next two weekends!

April 2022

A Grand Time Awaits!!

The Boulder Children’s Chorale will be front and center stage in two upcoming performances later this month! It’s remarkable to think that the last time we were able to perform a spring, end-of-season concert for a live audience was for the Boulder Children’s Chorale tenth-anniversary concert, April 2019. We can’t wait to welcome the greater Boulder community, our Boulder Chorale membership, and our Boulder Children’s Chorale families and friends to these upcoming events!

Afternoon on Broadway

Saturday, April 23, 2022

2:30 PM

Atonement Lutheran Church

Boulder, CO

Boulder Children’s Chorale

Dessert Show and Fundraiser

This matinee performance showcases solo singing, as our upper-level singers and BCC staff sing songs from the Broadway stage. Come enjoy an afternoon of music for FREE! Desserts will be sold on-site and donations will be accepted for this fun and delicious Dessert Show Fundraiser! For more information click here. If you are unable to attend but are able to donate to our fundraising event, please follow this link and donate now!

A Grand Night for Singing!

Sunday, April 24, 2022

4:00 PM

Mountain View Methodist Church

Boulder, CO

Boulder Children's Chorale

All Boulder Children’s Chorale singers will be spotlighted for our full concert—A Grand Night for Singing! In keeping with the Broadway theme, all four choirs will be singing a wide selection of music spanning the history of the Broadway stage, as well as other related styles. Our singers have had additional support and coaching from this season’s guest artist and theater clinician, Jennifer Carrier Hanna, who worked with our singers multiple times to develop their acting skills and to teach them how to emote while singing. The power and impact of hearing children raise their voices in song after so much time apart is not to be missed! Please join us!

Tickets

Brahms' Requiem

Saturday, April 30 & Sunday, May 1, 2022

4:00 PM

First United Methodist Church

Boulder, CO

Boulder Concert Chorale

Returning to singing this year, with masks and now - for many singers - without masks, has been wonderful and difficult at the same time. When Omicron surged, we needed to cancel our Origins: The Fertile Crescent concert in March, and decided to spend more time on our scheduled spring concert, Johannes Brahms' "A German Requiem." Beloved by choral singers the world over, the Brahms Requiem is not the traditional Latin mass, with their terrifying Dies Irae sections. Instead, Brahms composed a humanist requiem, with texts he chose from Luther's Bible. Brahms himself was agnostic, and wanted his Requiem to be reassuring and comforting to all who listened.

Though Brahms tinkered with the piece for many years, it was not until his mother died in 1865 that he completed the work. The fifth movement is the only movement featuring the soprano soloist, and it speaks of the comfort a mother provides, as well as the blessing of God's comfort. Brahms was not in the school of Wagner and Liszt, those late Romantics. He, along with his friend Clara Schumann, was interested in a more conservative approach, and so made intensive studies of the works of Palestrina, Handel, and Bach, among others. The structure of the Requiem shows his attention to these composers in its well-balanced structure, the presence of several fugues, and the beauty of the motet-like sections. The composer Arnold Schoenberg said that "aesthetic pleasure can also come from form," and there are few choral masterworks as beautifully constructed as this Requiem.

It is exciting to do the two-piano and timpani version of this piece. As you listen, you will hear the piece quite differently than you would if an orchestra were present. Though both have their strengths, we are finding that this version allows the audience to hear the chorus and soloists in a new way as they come out of the instrumental texture. We welcome our beautiful soloists, Julianne Davis and Brandon Tyler Padgett, and are pleased to be able to feature our own Boulder Chorale pianists, Susan Olenwine and Caitlin Strickland, as well as our guest timpanist, Nicolette Zillich.

Thank you for being a part of our Boulder Chorale family. We love to bring you our diversity programs and our traditional classical masterworks. "The most innovative choral programming in the country," as several conductors have said about us, is here for you in your own community of Boulder.

—Dr. Vicki Burrichter