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St. Olaf Choir’s eleven-city 2008 West Coast Tour includes debut at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall and concerts in Oregon, California and Arizona, Jan 30-Feb. 11
Conductor Anton Armstrong creates program that explores the legacies of the historic St. Olaf Choir and presents a diverse array of music that will delight choral music lovers
(Northfield, Minn.) – Founded in 1912 and internationally recognized as a creative force behind the a cappella choral tradition, the St. Olaf Choir and conductor Anton Armstrong will celebrate the ensemble’s heritage during their eleven-city 2008 West Coast Tour, which includes their debut at the S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium at Benaroya Hall in Seattle. Armstrong looked to the past to create a program that explores the legacies of the historic St. Olaf Choir and presents a rich and diverse array of works that will delight fans of great choral music.
In addition to two pre-tour and two post-tour concerts in Minnesota,* the St. Olaf Choir’s tour begins in Seattle on Wednesday, January 30, and concludes in Tucson Monday, Feb. 11. The four-state tour includes concerts in Portland, Eugene, Sacramento, Pasadena, San Diego and Phoenix. Information about tickets for these tour concerts is available online at: stolaftickets.com.
As part of this tour, Anton Armstrong, winner of the 2006 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, will present two outreach events for choral directors and their students. A Festival Chorus and Conductors’ Workshop is set for 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, January 31, at Trinity Lutheran Church in Lynnwood, Wash. (just north of Seattle), and A Festival Chorus and Conductors’ Workshop is set for 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, February 12, at Scottsdale Christian Academy in Scottsdale, Arizona.
“A new tradition we have started with our tours is to create a non-competitive environment for us to work with students and their teachers in some of the communities we visit,” Armstrong said. “These events provide high school students with an opportunity to perform side-by-side with members of the St. Olaf Choir. Our hope is that we can demonstrate how the arts can transform their lives.”
A mid-winter national tour to a region of the United States is an annual tradition for the St. Olaf Choir, and each year Armstrong selects a program that features a rich tapestry of classical, sacred and world music, giving the ensemble new adventures in performance. “This year we are touring with a program that is primarily a cappella,” Armstrong says. “A full choral concert presented unaccompanied by instruments is demanding for the singers, and it’s a style of performance that gave the St. Olaf Choir national prominence during its earliest years.”
Music from the Renaissance has always had a significant place in the St. Olaf Choir’s programs, and this tour program opens with Peter Philips’ Ascendit Deus, Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus and and the first movement of Bach’s Jauchzet dem Herrn for double chorus.
“Choral works based on great Protestant hymns literally helped give birth to the St. Olaf Choir,” Armstrong says, and its founder F. Melius Christiansen’s arrangement of Lindeman’s Built on the Rock was performed regularly during those early years. It opens Part II of the program, followed by Mendelssohn’s For God Commanded Angels, Gustav Schreck’s Lord Hosanna (Advent Motet) arranged by Olaf C. Christiansen (the second conductor of the St. Olaf Choir and F. Melius’ son), Kirke Mechem’s By the Rivers of Babylon (Peace Motets) and Charles Forsberg’s The Exaltation of Christ.
“Mechem’s lovely modern-day motet was originally composed for the Dale Warland Singers, and it is a powerful prayer for peace,” Armstrong says. “Charles Forsberg, Professor of Music, was a teacher of mine when I was a student at St. Olaf College, and he composed his tour de force The Exaltation of Christ for the St. Olaf Choir’s 1980 tour to Norway with Kenneth Jennings (the Choir’s third conductor)”
The second half of the program opens with Olaf C. Christiansen’s The Song of Peace, followed by Ralph M. Johnson’s The Ocean of Peace and Arvo Pärt’s …which was the son of…. “Given the issues of the day, we want to present works that offer hope and comfort,” Armstrong says. “The Ocean of Peace is a sophisticated work by a St. Olaf alumnus. It has a very powerful text. Arvo Pärt is one of the preeminent choral composers of our time, and this work is more atypical compared to his other works. While it is minimalistic harmonically, it’s not minimalistic rhythmically.”
Armstrong has also included three works of Scandinavian heritage in a section he has titled “From the Land of the Midnight Sun” featuring Hildor Lundvik’s Nocturnes (Swedish), Alfred Paulsen’s Norge, mitt Norge (one of the great national songs of Norway) as well as Domaredansen (a rain dance performed during the holiday season in Norway) arranged by Drew Collins.
The final section of the program features “music that speaks directly to the heart,” Armstrong says. “I believe that world music has an important place on our concert programs. David Maddux’s arrangement of O Sifuni Mungu is based on African folk music with Swahili text and percussion. Z. Randall Stroope’s The Pasture (Where the Earth Meets the Sky) requires musicians of great skill, and to hear the St. Olaf Choir sing in unison can be very haunting.” The program concludes with Atahualpa Yupanqui’s Duerme Negrito and Moses G. Hogan’s arrangement of My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord. “I’ve long championed Hogan’s work,” Armstrong adds, “and it’s the title work of a CD we issued in 2001 on the St. Olaf Records label.”
The tour concerts conclude with What a Wonderful World arranged by René Clausen and F. Melius Christiansen’s Beautiful Savior.
The St. Olaf Choir is the premier choral ensemble of Minnesota’s St. Olaf College, and is best known today for its performances in the annual internationally broadcast “St. Olaf Christmas Festival” on PBS. The St. Olaf Choir is comprised of full-time undergraduate students at St. Olaf College, a liberal arts institution in Northfield, Minnesota, which currently enrolls about 3,000 students.
The singers commit to balancing full course loads with rehearsals five days a week, and further demonstrating their unique commitment, choir members perform concerts entirely from memory. Anton Armstrong has conducted the St. Olaf Choir since 1990. There have been only three other conductors of the St. Olaf Choir since its inception more than 90 years ago: Kenneth Jennings, Olaf Christiansen and the founder and first conductor F. Melius Christiansen.
The St. Olaf Choir has also been featured in a number of symphonic collaborations, including the Minnesota Orchestra and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, under the batons of Sir Neville Marriner, Neemi Jarvi, Sir David Willcocks, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Andreas Delfs, Helmuth Rilling and the late Robert Shaw. Touring, recording and broadcasts are all major components in the artistic life of the St. Olaf Choir. The St. Olaf Choir has performed for capacity audiences in major concert halls across the nation and overseas since 1920. Annual tours attract audiences totaling 25,000. Recent tours have included a 2005 Tour of Norway, a 2001 European tour including Paris, Prague, Vienna and Berlin, and a 1997 “down under” tour to Australia and New Zealand.
The St. Olaf Choir’s ever-expanding discography now features 25 discs following the 2007 release of Repertoire for Mixed Voices, Volume 1, which is the first of a two-disc compilation of “home concert” recordings from the 2001 to 2006 national tours recorded in Boe Memorial Chapel on the campus of St. Olaf College. Repertoire for Mixed Voices, Volume 2, will be released in 2008. All recordings are available through St. Olaf Records at www.stolafrecords.com or (507) 646-3048. To learn more about the St. Olaf Choir, log on to www.stolafchoir.com.
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* Before embarking on their 2008 West Coast Tour, the St. Olaf Choir and conductor Anton Armstrong present two Minnesota concerts in Brainerd 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 26, at Tornstrom Auditorium and 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 27, at St. Mary’s Cathedral in St. Cloud.
Following the final tour concert in Tucson, they return to Minnesota for a concert at Wayzata Community Church in the Twin Cities 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 16, and a home concert at Boe Memorial Chapel on the St. Olaf College campus 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 17.