True Concord Voices and Orchestra will continue its America at 250 celebration when it opens its “The American Experience: Our Nation Sings” season this weekend.
“American Classics & Currents” features works by some of America’s most celebrated choral composers alongside some of today’s emerging and rising voices.
Jeffrey Derus fits in the latter.
True Concord will perform the world premiere of the composer’s “Where They Are Sung,” which took first prize in the ninth annual Stephen Paulus Emerging Composers Competition.
Conductor Eric Holtan, center, will lead True Concord Voices and Orchestra this weekend in the opening concert of its 23rd season.
The work is a setting of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “Songs for the People,” which was selected through True Concord’s partnership with the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Watkins Harper, an influential 19th-century abolitionist and suffragist, was the first African American woman to publish a short story.
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The True Concord win is the latest for Derus, whose 2022 concert piece “From Where They Are Sung” was a hit on streaming platforms and earned him a pair of Global Music Award Gold Medals.
True Concord will perform the world premiere of Jeffrey Derus’ “Where They Are Sung,” which took first place in the ninth annual Stephen Paulus Emerging Composers Competition.
This weekend’s program opens with Eric Whitacre’s “Water Night” and includes enduring choral works by Samuel Barber (“Sure on This Shining Night”), John Corigliano (“Fern Hill”), Emma Lou Diemer (“Three Madrigals”), Stephen Paulus (“Pilgrims’ Hymn”) and Randall Thompson (“Alleluia”).
It also includes two works by True Concord’s co-composers-in-residence Jocelyn Hagen and Timothy C. Takach: the husband-and-wife’s collaboration “Beatitudes” and Takach’s “We Are Phoenix: Imagine We Are Trees.”
Last year, the two-time Grammy-nominated True Concord released “Here I Am: Choral Works of Jocelyn Hagen” on Reference Recording.
The concert closes with William Grant Still’s 1941 patriotic and anti-fascist anthem “Plain-Chant for America,” based on Katherine Garrison Chapin’s pre-World War II protest poetry.
True Concord will perform the concert at 4 p.m. Friday, Oct. 16, at Green Valley’s Valley Presbyterian Church, 2800 S. Camino del Sol; and at 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 17, and 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 18, at Catalina Foothills High School in Tucson, 4300 E. Sunrise Drive.
Tickets are $23.50-$73.50 through trueconcord.org.
Contact reporter Cathalena E. Burch at cburch@tucson.com. On Bluesky @Starburch
Cathalena E. Burch
Reporter
