Grammy-nominated Tucson choir drops latest world-premiere CD

That work, “Here I Am,” was meant to commemorate the centennial in 2020 of the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote and the suffrage movement that led to its passage.

The two-time Grammy-nominated Tucson ensemble, with soprano soloist Susanna Phillips and the Tucson Girls Chorus, performed the world premiere of “Here I Am” in 2023 after two pandemic-related delays that pushed back the original 2020 premiere.

The two works bookend True Concord’s latest world-premiere recording, “Here I Am: Choral Music of Jocelyn Hagen,” which Reference Records will release on Friday, Aug. 14. It’s True Concord’s fourth world-premiere recording of composers whose works the ensemble championed and brought to life and its first on Reference, one of the country’s leading classical music imprints.

“Here I Am” is like that good book you can’t put down, but you don’t want to rush because you don’t want it to end. Sure, you can re-read the book, but the ending will still be the same.

With Hagen’s “Here I Am: Choral Music of Jocelyn Hagen,” each time you play it you might hear something different — tiny nuances that add context or change your perception — and the experience is new again.

And this is a recording worthy of hitting repeat. It’s a beautiful recording with Holtan and the choir numbering almost 30 and the similarly-sized orchestra bringing out the vibrant shades of Hagen’s melodically stunning choral writing, from the varied musical styles of “Notebooks” to the deeply moving soundtrack of the female-empowering “Here I Am.”

The disc opens with “Notebooks,” whose libretto draws from the 15th-century polymath’s writings and sketches that explore da Vinci’s views on art, nature, the human body and the universe. Hagen flirts with varying musical idioms, from Western classical on “Painting and Drawing,” where “a poem is a painting heard but not seen” and the emotional dissertation of “Ripples,” which showcases the strength of True Concord’s female voices, to the percussive heartbeat of the pseudo rock-opera “The Vitruvian Man,” a five-minute fingers-to-toes recitation of the human form.

The choir shines on the a capella “The Greatest Good,” with its layered recitatives extolling the “greatest good of all is knowledge,” but it is in the finale, “Look at the Stars,” where Hagen is able to sum up da Vinci’s insatiable quest for creativity.

The movement opens with flashes of Beethoven-esque energy before transitioning to a delightful contemporary pop/Broadway-like melody as the choir sings about time, the “consumer of all things,” and the deception of stars “so minute that it would seem that nothing could be smaller; it is in fact their diminution, for many of them are many times larger than the star which is the earth with water.”

“Here I Am,” Hagen’s stunning and lush declaration of female empowerment, is the centerpiece of the recording. Hagen incorporates the texts of 47 women from across time and the world, including Oprah Winfrey, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Bush, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Anna Julia Cooper, Frida Kahlo, Toni Morrison and Kamala Harris, to deliver a message encouraging women to speak up and stand out.

Holtan and True Concord bring out the brilliant textures of Hagen’s gorgeous melodies interspersed throughout the texts, from the bombastic, near dissonant opening chords to the lush dramatic setting of texts by Virginia Woolf and Glennon Doyle. The music grows somber when the mixed choir sings texts from Amanda Lovelace and then hauntingly dramatic in the second movement with Phillips soaring to the top of her stunning soprano range on texts from Hmong-American author Kao Kalia Yang.

In the final movement, Phillips and the mixed choir sing the texts of Amanda Lovelace’s “Write Your Story,” encouraging women to be the narrators of their own stories.

Phillips joins Tucson Girls Chorus for the finale, Hagen’s terrific setting of Yang’s “We are the keepers of the story” that encourages grandmothers, mothers and daughters to persevere against fears.

True Concord's two earlier world premiere recordings — “Far in the Heavens: Choral Music of Stephen Paulus” released in 2015 and 2024's “A Dream So Bright: Choral Music of Jake Runestad” — earned the ensemble Grammy nominations. "Far in the Heavens," though, earned composer Stephen Paulus a posthumous Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for the album’s centerpiece, “Prayers & Remembrances,” that True Concord commissioned in 2011 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11.