FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:  Melissa J. Eddy, 512-476-5775 (o), 512-217-1264 (c), email [Email address: meddy #AT# conspirare.org - replace #AT# with @ ]

Conspirare presents Sing Freedom: African American Spirituals

Friday, October 1, and Saturday, October 2, 8:00pm
St Martin’s Lutheran Church, 606 W. Fifteenth Street, Austin

Sunday, October 3, 3:00pm
St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, 8134 Mesa Drive, Austin

Tickets $25-44; Students/youth $10; Special pricing for groups; call for information
Tickets and information at 512-476-5775 or www.conspirare.org

Experience the exaltation as five-time Grammy®-nominated professional choir Conspirare rings the rafters with African American spirituals.  Born of yearning but bursting with hope, spirituals are quintessential American music – powerful, profound expressions of universal human feeling.  The program features old favorites like “City Called Heaven” and “Walk Together, Children” plus some surprises, including a new arrangement of “Lay This Body Down” by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang.  Spirituals are among the most popular repertoire in Conspirare’s history, and when you hear this concert you’ll know why.

Sing Freedom will also be performed Thursday, September 30 in Georgetown, Texas (tickets and information at 512-864-9591) and Tuesday, October 5, in Goshen, Indiana, at Goshen College’s acoustically renowned Sauder Hall (tickets and information at 574-535-7566). It will also be recorded in Sauder Hall for Conspirare’s next CD to be released in 2011 by Harmonia Mundi.

Craig Hella Johnson on the African American Spiritual

Study and performance of the African American spiritual has long been a passion of Conspirare’s artistic director Craig Hella Johnson, who has conducted extensive musicological research into the genre to prepare for this concert and recording.  The Library of Congress recently reported having more than 7000 spirituals or fragments of spirituals on record, of which only a relatively small handful are known and performed.  Johnson mines this deep reserve of the music that the Czech composer Dvořák, during his American sojourn more than a century ago, famously deemed the only genuine American folk music from which a national music could grow.

Johnson calls the spiritual “incredibly moving and influential American music” that must be sung “from the deepest place in our hearts.”  Commenting on the spiritual’s historic foundations, Johnson says, “The slaves/singers had deep identification with biblical stories of suffering.  While singing they were truly speaking to their own suffering and one hears directly the parallels to their own experience.”  He concludes, “What is made clear to me again and again, both from the melodies and words themselves and from hearing recordings by some of the great performers of spirituals, is that the essential requirement for this music to be well performed is that the singer must feel the spiritual deeply.”  It is this commitment to the spiritual’s history, emotional intensity, and honesty that Conspirare aims to fulfill in Sing Freedom.

Dr. Johnson is available by appointment for interviews about his study of the spiritual and about this concert.

About Conspirare

Increasingly hailed as the “best choir in the U.S.,” Conspirare is based in Austin and led by its award-winning founding artistic director Craig Hella Johnson.  Conspirare performs in Austin and other Texas communities as well as nationally and internationally.  While primarily a classical choir, Conspirare performs in all musical styles and is renowned for Johnson’s signature “collage” programming style that seamlessly blends diverse musical genres into one luminous whole.  Conspirare has recorded four commercial CDs, of which three received a total of five Grammy® nominations.  The most recent nomination was for its CD “A Company of Voices: Conspirare in Concert” in the category Best Classical Crossover Album.  Its CD “Requiem” also won a 2010 Edison Award (the “Dutch Grammy”).  For more about Conspirare, please visit www.conspirare.org.

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Photos of Conspirare and Craig Hella Johnson are available on request.

Please follow the link below to read the review by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin of the June 13th Long Center performance of J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor.

Austin American-Statesman, 6/16/10, austin360.com.

The Edison Foundation in Hilversum, The Netherlands, has announced the winners of the 2010 classical Edison Awards. The winners include Austin-based professional choir Conspirare, which will receive the award in the Choral Music category for its CD Requiem.

The Edison Award is the Dutch equivalent of the Grammy®, and the award is Conspirare’s first such honor at the international level. Other 2010 classical Edison winners include the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, London Symphony Orchestra, Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, and many other eminent ensembles and artists. Conspirare is the only North American winner.

Conspirare artistic director Craig Hella Johnson said: “Conspirare is deeply honored to be among the company of so many distinguished Edison winners. This international recognition is a great compliment to our wonderfully talented and dedicated singers who give so much of themselves to Conspirare’s audiences, both in live performances and on our recordings.”

Requiem was first released in the U.S. by the Clarion label in 2006 and garnered two Grammy nominations, for Best Choral Performance and Best Engineered Album, Classical. In 2009 Conspirare’s present label Harmonia Mundi re-issued the disc in the U.S. and released it for the first time in Europe, making it eligible for the Dutch award nomination.

The 2010 awards will be presented during the Edison Ceremony on Friday, June 18 at the Kurhaus in Scheveningen, The Netherlands. The ceremony will be broadcast live on Dutch national television.

The Edison Award, named for the inventor of the phonograph, is the oldest and most prestigious Dutch music prize, presented since 1960. For a full list of winners as posted on the Edison’s Dutch-language website, click http://www.edisons.nl/klassiek/nieuws/winnaars-edison-klassiek-2010.

An English-language winners’ list is available on request. For more information in English about the Edison Award, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Award.

Requiem CD page.

For a new work by Eric Banks

The national service organization Chorus America has announced its 2010 awards and Conspirare is on the list. The Austin-based professional choral organization will receive the Dale Warland Singers Commission Award to support the commission of a new work by Seattle composer Eric Banks. Previous winners of the Warland award, now in its third year, were Anima and Chanticleer. The Conspirare award and its cash prize will be presented June 18 at Chorus America’s annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

Ann Meier Baker, President and CEO of Chorus America, said: “Chorus America and our partner, the American Composers Forum, are delighted to present this award to Conspirare. Not only will the award directly support the planned commission from the talented composer Eric Banks, but it also recognizes Conspirare’s commitment to supporting living composers through performing their music. It is a pleasure to watch as choruses like Conspirare carry forward this important standard, one of the greatest legacies of the Dale Warland Singers for which the award is named.”

Banks will compose a work to be entitled This delicate universe, in the form of an a cappella cycle for 16-part chamber chorus, based on five poems by the Greek-Egyptian poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933). The piece will be performed in both Greek and English. Many of Banks’s choral compositions are macaronic, that is, composed in multiple languages. He believes that there is particular power when one intones poetry in its original language, and he also recognizes the great value in hearing translations of these texts sung in performance.

Eric Banks said: “My plan for This delicate universe is to set Cavafy’s strophes of Greek text in the background of the choral texture, and to declaim the English translations in the foreground, by a combination of soloists and small ensembles. I will utilize the full potential of Conspirare’s forces to create a choral soundscape that employs both the linguistic variety of modern Greek and the musical vocabulary of maqqam – the scalar system known throughout the Arab world for its ornaments and microtonal variation. I hope that by coupling such diverse sounds – Greek syllables and Arabic melodies – with my English translations, that Cavafy’s work will reach a wider appreciation with American audiences.”

Conspirare expects to premiere the new work within two years.

For more about the Chorus America awards, click here. For more about composer Eric Banks, click here.

Austin-based, five-time Grammy®-nominated professional choir Conspirare has received yet another prestigious nomination, this time for an Edison Award in the category Choral Music for its CD Requiem. The Edison Award is the Netherlands’ equivalent of the Grammy, and the nomination is Conspirare’s first such nod at the international level.

Requiem was first released in the U.S. by the Clarion label in 2006 and garnered Conspirare’s first two Grammy nominations, for Best Choral Performance and Best Engineered Album, Classical. In 2009 Conspirare’s present label Harmonia Mundi re-issued the disc in the U.S. and released it for the first time in Europe, making it eligible for the Dutch award nomination. The 2010 winners will be announced on June 18.

The Edison Award, named for the inventor of the phonograph, is the oldest and most prestigious Dutch music prize, presented since 1960. For more information about the Edison Award, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Award. For a direct link to the Edison Award’s Dutch-language website, click http://tinyurl.com/26tnley.

David brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, and skills acquired through his work with various cultural and nonprofit organizations.

David joins Conspirare after holding positions at Austin Lyric Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, and Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he received the Bachelor of Music in Music Business from Clarion University. David is a member of the Sanctuary Choir and Handbell Ringers of The First Baptist Church of Austin and serves on the Board of Trustees for the Tau Beta Sigma National Honorary Band Sorority. He has sung in choirs conducted by Lorin Maazel, Robert Page, Alice Parker, Moses Hogan, and James Jordon. David resides in Austin with his wife Karon, a native San Antonian.

Welcome, David!

Austin Chronicle, Jan. 15, 2010

Whenever we cross into a new year, we tend to focus on 12-month spans: the one just behind us, the one right ahead. But as I listened to Conspirare’s first concert of the new year,

I found myself being nudged beyond those immediate turnings of the calendar toward something broader, something grander.

It began the moment the 42 voices of the chorus launched into song: Max Reger’s “Der Mensch lebt und bestehet eine kleine Zeit” takes the measure of a man’s lifetime and finds it meager beside that of the Almighty. Within that sobering comparison lay the vastness of eternity, the awe-inspiring nature of it underscored by the reverence of Conspirare’s delivery. And as the ensemble worked its way through four more of the composer’s Acht Geistliche Gesänge (Eight Spiritual Songs), the singers built on our sense of this Being of boundless power and majesty, their hushed wonder at the sacrifice upon the cross occasionally swelling with passion as they smoothly ascended the scales. Reger’s 20th century evocation of Bach then gave way to the real thing: Johann Sebastian’s “Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied,” a jubilant call for praising God that got the entire choir worked up in a way that I don’t recall seeing before. From one end of the ensemble to the other, shoulders were rising and falling and black folders bobbing up and down. The music’s joyousness had everyone bouncing as if on springs.

When the songs weren’t invoking the Creator, they were invoking his creation and in ways that accentuated its monumental scope. Robert Schumann’s “An die Sterne” addressed itself to the “stars in heaven’s distant realm,” and you could feel their far remove through the singers’ voices pitched ethereally high and clustered so tightly as to strike the ears like ringing crystal. The only work of the evening not by a German composer, Samuel Barber’s “Sure on This Shining Night,” also looked toward those bright wanderers through the infinite, illuminating an Earth where, as James Agee’s text has it, “all is healed, all is health.” The song’s image of a planet at peace, set with that elegiac tenderness so characteristic of Barber, was caressed by the company of voices in a manner that pierced the heart. Schumann’s “Zigeunerleben,” vividly describing night in a gypsy camp, and the pieces from Brahms’ “Liebeslieder Waltzes,” dancing through the various joys and sorrows of love, limned the earthly realm in copious detail – blazing fires, rushing streams, trembling bushes, malicious lime-twigs – which Conspirare attacked with a cheery gusto.

In all the evening, however, there was no greater sense of expansiveness, of opening up to the fullness of creation, than in the “Deutsche Motette,” by Richard Strauss. It is built into the work, in the narrator’s appeal to the sun and stars to awaken him and in the vocal parts, which divide and divide and divide again, into nearly two dozen parts of dizzying range and staggering complexity. As the choir performed the motet, individual voices would break out of the choral whole like single dreamers rising from the common bed of night, all with the same cry but expressed in beautifully varied ways. The solo voices soared and dipped and wove in and around one another with astounding elegance and then fused together again, as if all those separate dreamers had recognized their shared entreaty and joined hands. It is part of the wonder of Conspirare that it can take works which are so formidable, so exacting, and render them with such grace that their difficulty isn’t apparent. With the Strauss, what you were aware of was not how hard the singers were working but how sumptuous and gorgeous and heavenly were their sounds, how they expanded your senses, put you in touch with earth and sky and stars.

Opening us up, connecting us to the greater world – that’s what Artistic Director Craig Hella Johnson and Conspirare do and do so well. And they did it here, just as the program’s title promised, in “classic” fashion. When I stepped out of St. Martin’s Church into a shining night of the new year, the calendar had fallen away, and I was feeling the timeless benediction of the stars and listening to the music of the spheres.

Austin360 blogs  >  Austin Arts: Seeing Things  >  Archives  >  2010 > January > 11 > Entry

Monday, January 11, 2010, 10:07 AM

There’s a reason Richard Strauss’ Deutsche Motette isn’t frequently performed. Though only about 20 minutes in length, it’s a sprawling late romantic symphony for voices, dense in its musical imagery and staggering in its complexity with some 16 vocal parts.

Leave it to Austin choir Conspirare — which just received its fifth Grammy nomination — to make stunning work of Strauss’ stunning Motette, the marquee piece of a concert Saturday night at the acoustically fine St. Martin’s Lutheran Church.

Rich in impressionistic nuance, the Motette awes with its spectacle — particularly its astonishing harmonic shifts. And Conspirare’s genius at singing as one voice while also allowing enough space of each singer’s own voice to shine through made for much clarity and emotional resonance.

If there was a theme to the program selected by Conspirare founder and artistic director Craig Hella Johnson, perhaps it was musical complexity.

Before unleashing the Strauss, Johnson and the choir pulled off Bach’s motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied with aplomb, deftly maneuvering through Bach’s rich and intriguing wave of counterpoint.

Balancing the mighty weight of the Bach and the Strauss were a selection of Brahms’ romantic Leibeslieder Waltzes, stylishly sung. And as a delightful detour, Johnson threw in ‘My Little Green Cactus,’ a jumpy 1920s tune sung in the a capella style of the Comedian Harmonists, an all-male German close harmony ensemble that was one of the more successful pre-World War II groups. As cute as it was, the song really just re-enforced what the rest of the program made clear: That Conspirare continually demonstrate superb control and dexterity as a choir, no matter the repertoire.

Later this month, Johnson and Conspirare will go up for their fifth Grammy nomination, this time for Best Classical Crossover Album, competing against the likes of Yo Yo Ma. That an Austin non-profit musical organization even has the chops to even compete against a classical music icon —and commercial juggernaut — like Ma is impressive. Then again, Conspirare has the voice that roars, sublimely.

“Company of Voices: Conspirare in Concert”

The Recording Academy just released nominations for the 52nd annual Grammy® awards, and Austin-based professional choral ensemble Conspirare is once again on the list. Conspirare is nominated in the category Best Classical Crossover Album for its CD “Company of Voices: Conspirare in Concert” on the Harmonia Mundi label.

“Company of Voices: Conspirare in Concert” was recorded live at the Long Center for the Performing Arts in Austin, Texas, in October 2008 in cooperation with PBS television station KLRU. It was first released as a DVD for national broadcast on PBS affiliate stations nationwide beginning in March 2009, and was subsequently released on CD by Harmonia Mundi in June 2009. Both the CD and DVD are available for purchase through Conspirare and through major retail record outlets.

The Grammy® nomination of “Company of Voices: Conspirare in Concert” is Conspirare’s fifth nomination. Previous nominations were in 2006 for “Requiem” (Best Choral Performance and Best Engineered Album, Classical) and 2008 for “Threshold of Night” (Best Choral Performance and Best Classical Album).

The award for Best Classical Crossover Album is given to the artist(s) and/or the conductor. In addition to the ensemble Conspirare, individuals named in the nomination are conductor Craig Hella Johnson, who is Conspirare’s founding artistic director, as well as percussionist Tom Burritt, oboist Ian Davidson, and cellist Bion Tsang, who were important collaborators in the album.

AUSTIN, TEXAS – Conspirare has received two Grammy® Award nominations from the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences for its recent CD, “Threshold of Night.”  The nominations are for Best Classical Album (Conspirare’s first time to be nominated in this category) and Best Choral Choral Performance.  “Threshold of Night” is the first Conspirare CD to be released on the distinguished Harmonia Mundi label.  The 51^st annual Grammy Awards will be announced on Sunday, February 8, 2008 at 7:00 pm central time on CBS.

In 2006, Conspirare received two Grammy nominations for the CD, “Requiem,” in the categories of Best Choral Performance and Best Engineered Album, Classical.  This recording contained the haunting anthem by singer-songwriter, Eliza Gilkyson, who will perform with the company at their annual “Christmas at the Carillon” concerts December 6 – 10, 2008.  All Austin performances are sold out except for Monday, December 8 at 8:00 pm at the Long Center for the Performing Arts.