Bringing in high school students from the Central New York area, Barbara Tagg and the Syracuse University Women’s Choir presented a festival exhibiting women’s choral music while working to educate younger singers on Saturday.

The women’s choir hosted its 8th annual Invitational Women’s Choir Festival, featuring performances from two local high school women’s choirs, the SU Women’s Choir and the Mandarins, a university-based female a cappella group. The festival featured a day of classes and rehearsals taught by a guest conductor, ending with a final concert in Setnor Auditorium.

Participating in the festival this year was the Cazenovia High School Women’s Choir and the Skaneateles High School Women’s Chamber Choir.

Every year Tagg, the director of the SU Women’s Choir, invites a guest director to conduct two numbers in the performance and work with choir members during the master classes and rehearsals.

‘The director I invite is usually someone I know from experiences in the world of choral music,’ Tagg said. ‘Sometimes they work with professional musicians, other times they are from universities.’

This year Tagg invited Cara Tasher, director of choral activities and associate professor of voice at the University of North Florida, to participate in the festival.

Tasher has conducted choral ensembles worldwide and has sung in several nationally renowned choral groups, such as the Chicago Symphony Chorus and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus, according to the concert’s program.

Tagg said a main component of the festival is to educate high school students on the workings of college choirs.

‘They’d have the opportunity to share in the choral arts,’ she said.

Hayley Isaacson, a freshman in the Bandier Program for Music and the Entertainment Industries, appreciated the concert’s ability to expose high school students to the university’s music program.

‘I like how they incorporated high school choirs and showed them a university choral setting,’ Isaacson said.

The concert began with the Skaneateles High School Women’s Chamber Choir, which performed ‘The Bells,’ an Edgar Allen Poe poem set to music, and ‘Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,’ a classical piece.

The Cazenovia High School Women’s Choir performed next. Among their selections were ‘Abbe Stadler,’ ‘She Sings…’ and ‘Velvet Shoes.’

The Mandarins, an all-women’s SU a cappella group, performed two songs, including Hall and Oates’ ‘You Make My Dreams Come True.’

The SU Women’s Choir performed three pieces: Hebrew love song ‘Kala, Kalla (Light Bride),’ ‘Will There Really Be a ‘Morning’?’ and a jazz arrangement of the Sound of Music’s ‘Favorite Things.’

The two high school choirs and the SU Women’s Choir concluded the concert by singing ‘O Music.’ Tagg selects the songs for the festival every year. Tasher also selected the next two selections, ‘How Can I Keep from Singing’ and ‘It Takes a Village.’

Attendees of the concert varied from family and friends of the high school students and Syracuse community members to SU students themselves.

Michael Rosen, a concert attendee, was pleased with the quality of the concert.

‘I thought it was very well done,’ Rosen said. ‘The guest conductor did an especially good job.’

Freshman public relations major Lauren Duda, a member of the SU Women’s Choir, enjoyed the musical depth the choir displayed.

‘The concert went extremely well,’ Duda said. ‘We nailed our notes and rhythms, and our word diction was especially spot-on. And the high schoolers were very mature and seemed to appreciate the opportunity they had been given to sing at SU.’

dspearl@syr.edu

Published on November 14, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Contact Diana: dspearl@syr.edu | @dianapearl_