2011-2012 Season Notes

The Minnesota Chorale’s 2011-2012 season—our 39th!—offers music for almost every taste.

We begin in midsummer, reprising our Grammy-nominated performance of Beethoven’s iconic Ninth Symphony with the Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä. Two performances are slated for Orchestra Hall (July 16), a third for the Minnesota Beethoven Festival in Winona (July 17). A week later, we make our traditional appearance as an opera chorus on the last night of Sommerfest (July 23), this year in Richard Strauss’s sumptuous Der Rosenkavalier under Andrew Litton’s baton.

Fast-forward to Bridges, the Chorale’s annual adventure in community engagement (November 19 & 20). This season’s program, Join the Dance!, is mounted in collaboration with Maryland’s Dance Exchange and Minnesota’s Courage Center. It’s addressed to individuals with physical disabilities, who will be paired with Chorale singers in dances made exclusively for them. The music includes a new work by Minneapolis composer Mary Ellen Childs, commissioned for the occasion.

Then comes one of the Chorale’s customary aerobic Decembers, highlighted by performances in Orchestra Hall of Handel’s ever-fresh Messiah, with the Minnesota Orchestra led by British harpsichordist/conductor Nicholas Kraemer (December 7, 10, and 11). Preceding the Orchestra Hall run is our annual Messiah Sing-Along at St. Olaf Catholic Church, conducted and hosted by Kathy Saltzman Romey (December 4). And back in Orchestra Hall, Romey shares the limelight with Doc Severinsen when Chorale and Orchestra join forces for Jingle Bell Doc, the legendary bandleader’s holiday smorgasbord (December 9 and 11).

On to 2012, which begins with an evening of Brahms (January 20), with Romey leading the Chorale and the Minnesota Orchestra in two of that composer’s choral masterworks, Nänie and Schicksalslied—part of a three-day Brahms mini-festival mounted by the Orchestra and modeled on last January’s memorable Mozart festival.

If April is the cruelest month, it’s also the most sensuous: Mark Wigglesworth leads the Chorale and the Minnesota Orchestra in Maurice Ravel’s gorgeously Gallic Daphnis et Chloe (April 27 and 28). Our season wraps up in June, with performances at the national conference of Chorus America (June 13) and as part of a special “Evening of Tribute and Surprise” (June 14 and 15), after which Orchestra Hall will close for renovation.

And then it’s on to our 40th anniversary season. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We look forward to serenading you in 2011-2012!

 
The Minnesota Chorale, named principal chorus of the Minnesota Orchestra in 2004, has sung with the Orchestra for more than three decades. Now entering its 39th season—and its 16th under the leadership of Kathy Saltzman Romey—the Chorale is Minnesota's preeminent symphonic chorus and ranks among the top professional choruses in the United States.