VocalEssence – Philip Brunelle, artistic director

The year was 1955, the place was Montgomery, Alabama. En route home after a long day at work, Rosa Parks changed American history when she took a stand against racism by refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. Her action ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott and set the course of civil rights in America.

Honoring her courage, VocalEssence will perform composer Hannibal Lokumbe’s Dear Mrs. Parks, an oratorio based on fictional letters written to Rosa Parks, at the 2007 WITNESS concert. This music incorporates African and African-American idioms and is based on Lokumbe's own texts.

Building on the theme of social justice, WITNESS will also examine the power of music to bring about positive social change with a selection of freedom songs from around the world.

The concert will feature the full 130-voice VocalEssence Chorus with orchestra and soloists, including Jevetta Steele, who sang the world premiere of Dear Mrs. Parks with the Detroit Symphony in February, 2005, and baritone Kevin Deas.

Star of Wonder, an annual one-hour family holiday concert open to the young and young at heart, will be held in Guild Hall at Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis. Children are invited to sit right up front on rugs and pillows to enjoy the show and to take home a charming coloring page from children's book illustrator Lorin Walter.

The 32-voice VocalEssence Ensemble Singers and conductor Philip Brunelle will perform a variety of carols, along with special guest instrumentalists and dancers from Mississippi Creative Arts Magnet School.

The audience will enjoy singing along to familiar Christmas carols including a rousing version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” sing-along. And the talented Mississippi Stars dance troupe will entertain with lively interpretations of two carols.

Tickets for this special event are only $10 for adults and $5 for children ages 4-18. (Service charges may apply.) Children 3 and under are free!

Spooky tales, a signature monologue and spirited sing-alongs will make this family-friendly Halloween concert a treat for all. Along with storyteller Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion familiars Tim "R.I.P." Russell, Sue "Styx" Scott, "Screamin'" Tom Keith and Rich "Bones" Dworsky will join the VocalEssence Chorus conducted by Philip "Phantom" Brunelle.

British composer Judith Bingham contributes her newest piece, Ghost Towns of the American West, to the festivities. This work was made possible by a Barlow Foundation grant awarded to for her to compose a new work for three choruses: the VocalEssence Ensemble Singers in Minneapolis, the BBC Singers in London and the University of Utah Singers in Salt Lake City.

Plus, this special event is a benefit for VocalEssence community engagement programs that that serve schoolchildren, college students, adults, singers and composers.

Regular price tickets are $20-$35 (half price for students). A special section of VIP seating priced at $100 per ticket ($55 tax-deductible) is available that includes an exclusive post-concert reception with all of our special guests from A Prairie Home Companion.

This special event may also be ordered along with your VocalEssence season tickets. Call 612-624-2345 to order or purchase season tickets online.

VocalEssence and the 9-voice male ensemble Cantus joined forces for a program of enduring American choral classics and favorite folksongs. American Voices showcased composers from across three centuries, among them William Billings, Nathaniel Dett, Randall Thompson, Aaron Copland and Alice Parker.

Music of several leading Minnesota-connected composers — Dominick Argento, Brent Michael Davids, Aaron Jay Kernis, Libby Larsen and Stephen Paulus — made up a section of the concert. All of the works are by composers recognized as American masters by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Cantus was featured in Samuel Barber's dramatic piece A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map. Written in 1940, this work is a setting of a lament for a soldier who has fallen in the Spanish Civil War. The VocalEssence Ensemble Singers, the 32-voice professional chorus of VocalEssence, were featured in Ned Rorem's poignant In Time of Pestilence.

American Voices is presented as part of American Masterpieces: Choral Music, a new initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts that promotes regional celebrations of our country's master composers. Cantus and VocalEssence are among eight ensembles across the country chosen by the NEA to present festivals of American choral music.

This fall, the Westminster Cathedral Choir, the only English church choir to win Gramophone Awards for “Best Choral Recording” and “Record of the Year,” will come to call. This renowned men and boys choir is also the only professional Catholic choir in the world to sing daily Mass and Vespers, which they have been doing since the Cathedral was built in 1903.

Composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst and Herbert Howells have written expressly for the choir; recently, the choir premiered three new masses by Roxanna Panufnik, James MacMillan and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. They will be able to draw on this long tradition for their performance in Saint Paul.

Just as exciting, Westminster Cathedral Choir will give the world premiere of a new work by Minnesota composer David Evan Thomas, his pastoral setting of "With a Glorious Eye."

VocalEssence and Minnesota Public Radio are co-presenting the appearance of Westminster Cathedral Choir of London.

VocalEssence and a veritable host of performers representing all musical genres will bring William Bolcom's kaleidoscopic song cycle, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, to life at Orchestra Hall.

An ambitious setting of William Blake's 46 poems, this Grammy Award-winning work emerged over the course of 25 years of the composer's life, incorporating elements of classical, choral, rock, blues, country, reggae and folk music.

The VocalEssence Chorus & Ensemble Singers, the Minnesota Chorale, the Minnesota Boychoir and ten vocal soloists will perform the work with a 105-piece symphony orchestra — a total of over 400 musicians on stage! And the music will be illuminated with dramatic staging and projected images to create a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

These two concerts are the highlight of Illuminating Bolcom, a two-week festival of the composer's musical genius. Tickets for several other Illuminating Bolcom events, including an organ recital by David Higgs and a cabaret song performance at The Fitzgerald Theater with Bolcom at the piano, will be available for purchase this fall.