Los Angeles Master Chorale's High School Choir Festival Concert to Stream Online

The Los Angeles Master Chorale's High School Choir Festival concert will reach a bigger audience than ever before this month with its first online stream that can be viewed for free. The stream will be made available at lamasterchorale.org on Friday, April 28, a week after the 28th Annual High School Choir Festival concert that takes place Friday, April 21 at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

A thousand high school choir students from 29 Southland schools will perform in the Festival concert conducted by Los Angeles Master Chorale Artistic Director Grant Gershon and featuring guest artist singer/composer Moira Smiley. The Festival concert attracts a full house every year to Disney Hall in downtown L.A., the students joined by family members, teachers, supporters, and choral music lovers who receive free tickets to the concert. Reserved tickets for this year's Festival concert have reached capacity. A limited number of tickets will be available on the day of the concert, distributed on a first-come first-served basis in the concert hall lobby from 10 AM.

The online stream will make the concert more accessible to people who cannot attend in person and will also give the student singers and choir directors the opportunity to watch their own performances after the event.

"This exciting Festival concert attracts a full house every year and the enthusiastic and supportive audience adds enormously to the energy of the day," said Gershon. "We also know that a lot of people who would like to attend and support these young singers are working or cannot get downtown to the hall and so this online stream will enable many, many more people to be part of this extraordinary and inspiring experience."

YOUNG COMPOSERS' COMPETITION

In addition to the Festival concert performed by the students at 1 PM, the Festival day includes a performance by the 16-member Los Angeles Master Chorale Chamber Ensemble in Walt Disney Concert Hall conducted by Assistant Conductor Jenny Wong.

The 30-minute Chamber Ensemble performance takes place at 11 AM and will include the premiere of a five-minute work called Wir Juden (We Jews) by 18-year-old Lucy McKnight that was selected as the winner of the Master Chorale's second annual Young Composers' Competition. The piece-McKnight's first choral composition-is based on a poem by Gertrud Kolmar, a German-Jewish writer who died at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943. McKnight discovered Wir Judenin a collection of Komar's work that is her mother's favorite book of poetry.

"There is so much joy and beauty in Gertrud Kolmar's poetry, but this poem about her love for her people and her anguish over their impending doom just seemed like it needed to be sung," said McKnight. "I tried to show how powerful her voice is, how she had the courage to embrace her Jewish identity even as Europe's Jews were being targeted for destruction."

A freshman at USC, McKnight is a former student of Ramón C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts where she took part in three of the Los Angeles Master Chorale's Oratorio Projects. In 2016 Cortines High School students composed a piece called Woman at the Window based on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York in 1911. McKnight sang the featured role of Rose in these performances.

"I cannot imagine a more exciting place as the Walt Disney Concert Hall or more beautiful voices to sing my first piece of choral music. I am so proud that Los Angeles Master Chorale Chamber Ensemble will sing Wir Juden at the 28th Annual High School Choir Festival."

Tickets for the Los Angeles Master Chorale Chamber Ensemble performance are also free to the public with a limited number available on the day of the performance. (Note: this performance will not be part of the online stream.)

First held in 1989 and impacting thousands of young singers in the ensuing decades, the Los Angeles Master Chorale's High School Choir Festival is one of the longest-running continuous education engagement programs in Southern California. The Walt Disney Concert Hall performances are the culmination of an in-depth, year-long, in-school program that includes intensive teacher training, classroom rehearsals, and masterclasses for students and choral directors led by members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Of the 1,000 students, 100 are selected by their teachers to be part of the prestigious Honor Choir.

To post a comment, you must register and login.