Kitka Announces WINTERSONGS Tour, Set for 12/8-22

Powerhouse women's vocal ensemble, Kitka, has announced dates for its annual Wintersongs tour. Five concerts are scheduled between December 8 and 21, 2013 at venues in Jenner, Oakland, Point Reyes Station, Menlo Park and San Francisco. The tour concludes in Oakland on December 22 with Kitka's wildly popular Wintersongs Community Sing, a sing-along event organized around favorite selections from Kitka's Wintersongs songbook. Accompanying these events is the release of a new DVD and digital album, Wintersongs with Kitka: Live at Old First Concerts, to go on sale December 1.

Wintersongs is Kitka's critically acclaimed winter holiday program showcasing seasonal music from a wide variety of Eastern European ethnic and spiritual traditions. "A refreshing spin on traditional seasonal choral music...thoroughly marvelous!" exclaims National Public Radio.

For countless centuries, people around the world have used the power of community singing to infuse warmth, cheer, spirituality, wishes for peace, health, and good fortune into the long, dark, cold and difficult winter season. And Eastern Europe's geographic position as a crossroads between Europe and the Orient has produced an astonishingly rich and varied array of seasonal musical rituals.

Subtitled "A World Unknown", this year's Wintersongs program features an unexpected new element, folk polyphony from the American South. The phrase "A World Unknown" is drawn from the lyrics of "Idumea", an 18th-century hymn from the American Sacred Harp tradition. Kitka will weave "Idumea" together with a song in a similar haunting pentatonic scale from the mountainous Epirus region of Northern Greece.

Another striking new offering in this year's program is a song from the Bosnian-Muslim ganga tradition which captures the spirit of families reuniting to sing during the holidays. "We immersed ourselves in the ganga song-form during our recent collaborations in California and Serbia with Balkan traditional singer Svetlana Spajic," explains Kitka's Executive Artistic Director Shira Cion.

"Ganga songs are often sung in praise of the happy themes of home and kin. Yet, ganga is probably one of the most controversial musical forms in former Yugoslavia," continues Cion. "It is sung in mountainous regions by both Orthodox Serbs and Bosnian Muslims. Urban dwellers tend to dismiss ganga as primitive, cacaphonous sound while rural people consider it their most expressive form of music-making. The singers and their active listeners achieve maximal harmony through dissonance. Imagine the most extreme possible sonic contrast to 'Silent Night', and you'll hear something like ganga."

Kitka's 2013 Wintersongs tour begins December 8 at Fort Ross State Historic Park in Jenner, CA. Prior to the opening concert, Fort Ross will host a site tour and Russian tea and Pirogi with Kitka to benefit the Fort Ross Conservancy. The following weekend the ensemble performs at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Oakland on December 13, the Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station on December 14, and at Arts at St. Bede's in Menlo Park on December 15. On December 21, Old First Concerts in San Francisco will co-present Kitka's final 2013 Wintersongs concert. The following day Kitka returns to Nile Hall in Oakland's historic Preservation Park to present their third annual Wintersongs Community Sing. Here, all present are encouraged to raise their voices in joyful harmony with Kitka in celebration of the season.

Concert tickets range from $10 to $55, and may be purchased online via links at Kitka.org or by calling 510.444.0323. Kitka's Wintersongs Community Sing accepts a freewill donation.

Kitka's new concert DVD, Wintersongs with Kitka: Live at Old First Concerts, filmed in 2012 by Rapt Productions, will be available for purchase at each concert and after December 1 online at Kitka.org. A separate audio-download release of Kitka's 2012 Wintersongs concert will be issued on the same date on Bandcamp.com.

Kitka's 2013 Wintersongs tour is supported, in part, by grants from the James Irvine Foundation Exploring Engagement Fund, The California Arts Council's Creating Places of Vitality program, The City of Oakland Cultural Funding Program, and DaVinci Fusion.Photo credit: Debra A. Zeller

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