Minnesota Chorale will celebrate 50th anniversary with a free concert

The Minnesota Chorale is known for the company it keeps.

You may find the group standing behind the Minnesota Orchestra, singing some massive work like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or Giuseppe Verdi's "Requiem." Or building bridges by collaborating with choirs from other continents. Or sprouting fresh branches to serve singers both young and old.

Founded in 1972, the chorale is celebrating its 50th anniversary Saturday with a free concert at Roseville Lutheran Church. Much like the old TV show "This Is Your Life," figures from its history will be on hand to conduct and help sing some of the music that made indelible memories.

Jon Lahann was there from the beginning — and still sings in the chorale 50 years later.

"The first rehearsal was Sept. 26, 1972, in the choir room at the brand new campus of Bethel College [in Arden Hills]," Lahann recalled last week. "I heard about the chorale from a co-worker at Centennial Junior High. He attended a class that summer at the University of Minnesota taught by Robert Berglund, who said he was starting a new choral group."

His objective was a choir that could perform alongside the Minnesota Orchestra and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.

Three months after its founding, it joined the Minnesota Orchestra for Gian Carlo Menotti's opera "Amahl and the Night Visitors." Two Decembers later, the chorale teamed with the SPCO for a J.S. Bach cantata and released its first album (Christmas music).

Thomas Lancaster, a University of Minnesota music professor, led the group from 1977 to '83. "My years with the chorale saw a real growth in its musical ability and sophistication," he said. "A very important step was the establishment of a core of professional singers" — nine in the 1980-81 season, which grew to 12 two years later.

Under his successor, Joel Revzen (1983-94), the chorale became the official chorus of the SPCO and helped christen the new Ordway Music Theater.

Its reputation grew well beyond Minnesota as it sang music of Hector Berlioz at Puerto Rico's Festival Casals, Joseph Haydn at Colorado's esteemed Aspen Festival, and Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony in Mexico City.

"I am not exaggerating when I say that the audience went wild at the end of the piece," longtime member Heather Hood said of the 1991 Mexico concert with that country's National Symphony Orchestra. "Stomping, jumping, clapping, shouting in ways that I had never experienced before. They didn't stop until we reprised part of the final movement. And then they went wild again!"

A turning point

Kathy Saltzman Romey has served as artistic director since 1995. She took the job on an interim basis the year before while working as a professor at Macalester College.

"I served on the search committee that selected Kathy Romey as music director," said former member Sue Tuthill Schiess. "That was a huge turning point for the chorale. With Joel Revzen we had, in essence, an opera conductor. With Kathy, we got a choral conductor, trained in the Robert Shaw tradition of 'just enough vibrato to dignify the tone.' …

"Kathy also brought with her a strong belief in the transformational power of music."

Romey launched the chorale's "Bridges" program, forging relationships with ensembles around the world.

"We've expanded into a musical organization that's crossing cultural, geographic and economic divides," Hood said. "We've partnered with inner-city schools and churches, the Russian and Latinx metro communities, gospel musicians, the disabled community, the memory-impaired community. We collaborated in a project with a choir from Japan, remembering the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

A 2018 journey to South Africa with the Minnesota Orchestra brought what many singers have called their most powerful memory with the chorale.

"Our concert in the Regina Mundi church in Soweto — the heart of the apartheid resistance movement, bullet holes still in the walls around us — is seared in my memory and heart," said chorale member Maya Tester. "The energy in that church was electrifying.

"The choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth represents the triumph of universal brotherhood against war and desperation, and to sing it in that place, with those people, embodied the struggle through the dark and into the light.

"The community joined in song and stood and danced when we sang their traditional songs, and, after the concert, we spilled out of the church, all still singing in the dark night. None of us wanted to stop singing. I have never felt the power of music more viscerally."

That trip resulted in a South African choir, the Gauteng Choristers, sending a group to Minneapolis, where they stayed in the homes of chorale members, then performed Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Dona Nobis Pacem" side by side with the Minnesota singers and orchestra.

"I thought that was very moving," Romey said.

So what's on Saturday's program?

"About 50 alumni singers will join us to sing what I call a 'legacy set,'" Romey said. "That will include five pieces, each representing the tenure of one of the chorale's five artistic directors." Included will be movements from Johannes Brahms' "Ein Deutsches Requiem," Leonard Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms" and Haydn's "The Creation."

"Tom Lancaster will be there to conduct the final movement of the Bach 'B Minor Mass,'" Romey said. "And Barbara Brooks will be conducting from the piano the opening movement of [Carl Orff's] 'Carmina Burana,' representing our longtime collaboration with Minnesota Dance Theatre. And we're going to end with the 'Hallelujah Chorus' sing-along."

An ideal closer for a chorus that thrives on collaboration.

Minnesota Chorale 50th Anniversary Legacy Concert
When: 7:30 p.m. Sat.
Where: Roseville Lutheran Church, 1215 W. Roselawn Av., Roseville.
Tickets: Free, available at mnchorale.org.

Rob Hubbard is a Twin Cities classical music writer. wordhub@yahoo.com.