The Hope College Chapel Choir will present its annual Home Concert on Monday, March 23, at 7:30 p.m. at St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church.
The public is invited. Admission is free.
The Chapel Choir will be performing repertoire from its March 12-18 spring break tour of Ohio, North Carolina and Virginia. This year’s concert program offers a wide variety of sacred and secular works from the Western choral tradition. The program also includes an entire set devoted to arrangements of South African songs, the result of a project by director Brad Richmond while on sabbatical in South Africa during the spring 2014 semester.
The concert will open with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Veni Sancte Spiritus,” and will also include the “Missa de feria,” by Orlando di Lasso; Eric Whitacre’s “A Boy and a Girl”; an arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “Oh, Susanna”; and several other works, concluding with “The Last Words of David,” by Randall Thompson. The choir will be accompanied by music faculty member Jennifer Wolfe on piano and djembe drum, and by Hope junior Aaron Goodyke of Zeeland on organ.
The Hope Chapel Choir, founded in 1938, has toured extensively throughout the United States and Canada, and has traveled abroad on eight occasions. Over the years the choir has received numerous invitations to sing at choral conferences and prestigious churches around the country. Recently, the choir toured South Africa, singing at large urban churches, universities, small parishes in townships, inner city missions and AIDS clinics. The choir is also featured in Hope College’s long-standing Christmas Vespers, the award-winning television broadcast of which is seen around the country at Christmastime on PBS.
The 40-voice ensemble, comprising student musicians from a wide variety of academic disciplines, is dedicated to the performance of the finest sacred and secular choral music. Students in the choir are selected by audition and maintain a rigorous rehearsal schedule in preparation for their concert tour and other engagements throughout the year.
Richmond is in his 18th year as director of choral activities at Hope, where he teaches conducting and voice, and directs the Chapel Choir and College Chorus. He previously served as director of choirs at Southeastern Louisiana University. His presentation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “B Minor Mass” with Southeastern Louisiana University’s Concert Choir and Orchestra won the Gambit Classical Arts Award for the best choral performance of 1998 in the New Orleans area and the surrounding region.
St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church is located at 195 W. 13th St., on the corner of 13th Street and Maple Avenue.