50 Years – Quite an Achievement, eh?

What does it take to create a season for our Chorale? We Asked Our Director, Anne Watson Born, and here's what we learned...

50 years – quite an achievement, eh? The Nashoba Valley Chorale began from a vision of its founders (Mike Manugian and Ruth Treen Wise) - a vision of a chorus for all singers, a non-auditioned group that would sing high-level repertoire and have a good time doing it. We are grateful for that vision and have worked to sustain it. And now we are on the verge of our 50th season, and your current conductor has been thinking on how to honor the Chorale and its history.

Worcester Youth Orchestra Collaboration

Creating a season always involves a mixture of some sort of educated research, and…luck. Luck in our case, for our 50th season, is our ongoing relationship with the Worcester Youth Orchestras. It is never less than thrilling to work with Jonathan Colby and the young people who play in WYO’s Symphonic Orchestra, and we will join them, as usual, in December, for their annual Holiday Concert. Be ready for the bagpipes (not a typo)! And we will join them on March 29, 2026, again in the splendid Mechanics Hall, for a concert of Brahms, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Bruckner. We will sing some glorious a cappella motets by Bruckner and close the concert with his magnificent Te Deum, for chorus, orchestra, and four vocal soloists.

Vista Philharmonic Collaboration

Another fortunate collaboration has been with the Vista Philharmonic, and we are super excited to have our sopranos and altos sing Mahler’s immense Symphony No. 3 with them in May. This work takes the performers and listeners through a veritable roller-coaster of emotions; as Michael Steinberg puts it, “Mahler’s No. 3 has the fullness of life.”

Grand January Performance

So. With these collaborative events acting as bookends, I embarked upon planning our grand January performance. We will sing music of the Romantic period in March, so January could be about the Baroque, Classical and contemporary periods. I knew we would want to reference our past by repeating some repertoire, and the Beethoven Mass in C has been performed by the Chorale three times (and was scheduled to be performed in April of 2020). It is a radiantly beautiful work, a work that rewards attention to detail and expressive singing.

The Chorale has, over the years, sung many masterpieces by J.S. Bach (the B Minor Mass, Motets 1 and 3, the Magnificat, and many, many cantatas); we continue that difficult and absorbing tradition with Motet No. 2, “Der Geist hilft unser Schwacheit auf” (“the Spirit comes to help our weakness”), a double chorus work that is exciting and profound. It is 8 minutes of non-stop singing, requiring concentration, a commitment to the rhythmic pulse, and vocal freedom.

Now we move into the “what goes with that?” phase. We need more pieces to fill out a program, including: something for our young Emerging Artist to sing; works to reflect our tradition of singing contemporary music; and a cappella pieces that feature our beautiful choral sound. We have the overall affect of the evening to consider, along with the texts we sing, which are full of prayers and praise. With all of that in mind, we add a piece by Vivaldi (“O Lord, make speed to save me”), featuring a beautiful soprano solo. Britten’s wonderfully rambunctious and beautiful Rejoice in the Lamb was orchestrated, at the composer’s request, by Imogen Holst, an accomplished composer in her own right. Hyo-Won Woo is a contemporary South Korean composer; her rhythmic and exciting setting of the Gloria from the Mass opens our program. It will be followed by Randall Thompson’s Alleluia, a work often sung by the Chorale since 1980. Thompson said of it, ‟It is a slow, sad piece, and…comparable to the Book of Job, where it is written, ‛The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’” Prayer and praise.

And there you are – I think it’s a program that reflects the different aspects of our history and where we are now. It is not an easy program, with its rhythmic difficulties, the variety of timbres, the different texts. And all those notes. But it will be intensely rewarding. And super fun.

See you in September! (or at our two Sings on August 18 and August 25)

Anne Watson Born