The Michael O’Neal Singers Present FEEL THE SPIRIT Featuring Soloist Indra Thomas
The North Atlanta ensemble opens its season with a concert exploring spirituals arranged for chorus, piano, and soloist.
North Atlanta's premier choral ensemble, The Michael O'Neal Singers (MOS), will launch the mainstage performance series of their 2026-2027 season with Feel the Spirit on Sunday, October 18, 2026, at 3:00 PM. Taking place at Roswell United Methodist Church, the afternoon concert celebrates the endurance, hope, and emotional depth of the African American spiritual.
The centerpiece of the performance is John Rutter's Feel the Spirit, a cycle of seven spirituals arranged for chorus, piano, and soloist. Joining the chorus for this milestone event is internationally recognized soprano Indra Thomas, whose celebrated career has taken her to major opera houses and concert halls across the globe, including the Metropolitan Opera, the Vienna State Opera, and Carnegie Hall.
Understanding Why the Spirit Sings
In a recent essay reflecting on the concert's program, Founder and Artistic Director Dr. Michael O'Neal shared insight into the deep cultural and emotional significance of these works:
"The African American spiritual is born out of the experience of enslaved Africans and their descendants in America... These songs emerged from a people whose freedom had been taken from them, whose lives were marked by extraordinary hardship and injustice, and whose voices nevertheless found a way to sing. The spirituals remind us that the human spirit is capable of remarkable things. It can endure. It can hope. It can lament. It can rejoice. It can resist. And sometimes, when words alone are not enough, it can sing."
O'Neal highlights that the power of this repertoire lies in its ability to express a vast spectrum of human feeling within a single musical thought:
"Consider Every Time I Feel the Spirit. There is something almost paradoxical about that title. It does not say 'every time I understand the spirit' or 'every time I can explain the spirit.' It says 'every time I feel the spirit.' The spiritual is not primarily an intellectual experience. It is embodied. It is something felt in the voice, in the rhythm, in the breath, in the gathering of people who sing together... Every performance of a spiritual is also an act of remembrance."
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