FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DATE: October 19, 2020
[TUCSON, AZ]—This December Arizona Repertory Singers will debut an ambitious choral project. While Covid-19 continues to limit community gatherings, ARS has creatively persevered, finding modern and safe ways to keep singing and sharing music with the community.
“We are recreating the concert experience,” said ARS music director Ryan Phillips. This year ARS will offer their annual December concert online. Home for the Holidays will premiere December 11.
Months in the making, members of the choral ensemble have rehearsed and recorded themselves in their own homes. Phillips has spent weeks editing the video and audio recordings to create the online concert.
Musical selections span the sacred and secular including Benjamin Britten’s “Wolcum Yole,” from his Ceremony of Carols, chromatic harmonies from African-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Summer is Gone,” and Shawn Kirchner’s bluegrass inspired rendition of “Brightest and Best” with violin, cello, and piano accompaniment. Pianist Trissina Kear and guitarist/director Ryan Phillips will also offer special music as part of the concert. Friends and family of ARS members were invited to contribute to a special community video performance of Eric William Barnum’s “Sweeter Still.”
Tickets are $20 per household and allow access to a link to the concert program on December 11. Embedded videos of the musical pieces will be interspersed with conductor notes, and images. The concert will remain online until the end of the year.
“It will be a lot like flipping through a concert program at a live performance, and then clicking on the videos to hear each piece,” Phillips said.
Tickets and a sneak peak of the concert are available at the ARS website: www.arsingers.org.
ARS will also offer video holiday cards that can be sent to family and friends by email. The e-greeting cards will feature quartets of ARS ensemble members. They will be sold online at arsingers.org on a pay-what-you-wish basis.
“Even though we can’t all be together, we are delighted to share beautiful music with the community,” Phillips said. “Music can lift our spirits and remind us of the beauty that is still with us, even in troubled times.”
Arizona Repertory Singers online December concert “Home for the Holidays” premieres the evening of Dec. 11.
Tickets sold online and will provide a link to the online program.
Cost: $20 per household
Choral works— Benjamin Britten’s “Wolcum Yole”; Coleridge-Taylor’s “Summer is Gone”; Matthew Colloton’s “Away in a Manger”; Orlando di Lasso’s “Resonet in Laudibus”; Jack Klebanow’s “Erev Shel Shoshanim”; Shawn Kirchner’s “Brightest and Best”; and Eric William Barnum’s “Sweeter Still.” Solo piano works will include— “Fum Fum Fum” and “Silent Night.” A virtual guitar ensemble will perform “Carol of the Bells.”
The Arizona Repertory Singers is an auditioned ensemble of singers from greater Tucson. Since 1984 this choir has developed an extensive repertory and prides itself on presenting high quality performances of the standard repertoire and new music. Our community of singers, selected through a rigorous audition process, represent a variety of work life careers in business, education, engineering, information technology, law, medicine, social service, science and the arts.
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