2010 Festival Destination: New Orleans!

David Brunner With Boys

 

 

Five Concert Choir members, three Training Choir members, six parents, and Conductor Margaret Thomas boarded an Amtrak train in Jackson on June 25 en route for The Big Easy! For five days the group participated in rehearsals of the Crescent City Choral Festival in downtown New Orleans and also found time to explore the city and have fun with one another.

 

Mississippi choirboys sang for a Sunday morning service at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church and again during the festival’s final concert at St. Louis Cathedral. Conductors of the mass choir were host director, Cheryl Dupont—of the New Orleans Children’s Choir—and composer David Brunner.

Mississippi Boychoir 15th Anniversary Celebration

See Review at The Continuo Online

Mississippi Boychoir will celebrate its 15th anniversary at a Dinner Concert on June 5th, 2010, with a full day of activities for choirboys, alums and the general public.    
Featured guests will be an Alumni Chorus and two alums who now are performing in New York (each having played a staring role in a Disney musical on Broadway) and the Tommy Sciple Jazz Trio.

Festival fun in San Francisco

Boys with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background

Eight members and five adults traveled to San Francisco on July 13 to participate in the Golden Gate International Festival for Children's and Youth Choirs, sponsored by the Piedmont East Bay Children's Choir, Piedmont, CA. 

Boychoir Alum Welcomes Boychoir to Millsaps

Alum hears Boychoir performance at Millsaps College.

Richmond Culp was in Mississippi Boychoir from 2001 through 2003 when he was in the sixth and seventh grades.  He had the distinction of being the Boychoir’s emissary to Seattle to sing Eudora’s Fable: The Shoe Bird with the Seattle Symphony’s Northwest premier of that work, which Mississippi Boychoir commissioned Samuel Jones to write.  The work is based on Eudora Welty’s book, The Shoe Bird.  Jones,  a native Mississippian, is Composer-in-Residence at the Seattle Symphony Orchestra.

Mississippi Boychoir Performs in Jackson

Fondren Presbyterian Church

A review of the choir’s performance appeared on April 27 in The Continuo Online, a publication of the Jackson Chapter of the American Guild of Organist.    The Continuo is an ongoing calendar which lists performances by artists and arts organizations in the state of Mississippi.

Boychoir Brings Evensong Tradition to Mississippi

Evensong Service

The centuries old European tradition of choral singing by men and boys at the close of the day is accessible to Mississippians during Mississippi Boychoir’s Evensong Service presentations in April and May, 2009. The services are in collaboration with Parkway Heights United Methodist Church in Hattiesburg, Fondren Presbyterian Church in Jackson, and St. John’s Episcopal Church in Laurel.

Seattle recording of Missississpi Boychoir commissioned work, The Shoe Bird wins nomination for Grammy Award

Seattle event had Mississippi roots

On November 1 Conductor Margaret Thomas, Manager Betty Jacobs, and Board President Diane Blankenhorn joined the excitement going on in Seattle, where the release of a new audio was being celebrated with two performances of a work that was commissioned by Mississippi Boychoir in 1999.  A four-year, $80,000 project from conception to performance, Eudora’s Fable: The Shoe Bird was based on a book for children written by one of Mississippi’s Pulitzer Prize authors, Eudora Welty, and was set to music by native Mississippian, Samuel Jones, the current composer in residence at the Seatlle Symphony.

Concert at Covenant Church

2007 Concert at Covenant Church

Mississippi Boychoir Christmas concerts are again being presented at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Hattiesburg and at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Jackson. The concerts feature Christmas favorites from several centuries, representing varying styles. Included in the repertoire is the Alleluia from Bach’s Christmas Cantata #142, the French carol Il est ne le divin enfant, a K. Lee Scott arrangement of the same traditional Welsh melody from which Suo Gan was based in the movie, Empire of the Sun, and concluding with jazz arrangements of I’ll Be Home for Christmas and Jingle Bell Rock.