Press Release: CCC Award and Seventh Season Announcement

Cleveland Chamber Choir Announces Top Choral Award
 
We are incredibly delighted and humbled to announce that the Cleveland Chamber Choir has won the top prize at the World Youth and Children Choral Artists’ Association’s World Choir Festival (www.wyccaa.com/2021wcf). The “Choir of the World Award” was presented to the top performing group in an online festival that saw competition by almost 200 international choirs and adjudication by 50 international jury members. In addition to this wonderful award, our performance of Andrew Rindfleisch’s I Sing to Use the Waiting and Linda Kachelmeier’s O vos omnes also earned us the award for “Most Musically Moving Performance,” and our Artistic Director Scott MacPherson was designated as an “Outstanding Conductor.” 
 
Thank you to the WYCCAA and all of the judges for this wonderful recognition, and congratulations to all participating groups on their beautiful performances. We are deeply honored.
 
 
Cleveland Chamber Choir Announces 2021-2021 Seventh Season
 
As we return to live, in-person performances, the Cleveland Chamber Choir is pleased to announce our 2021-2022 Seventh Season.
 
On December 11 & 12, 2021, we will unveil a holiday program with music of thanksgiving as well as carols from around the world. Continuing our commitment to performing the music of living composers, this concert will include another Hannukah song commission by local composer Corey K. Rubin. This will complete his triptych, and we are proud to present it in its entirety.
 
Renowned and award-winning British composer Cecilia McDowall will travel to Cleveland in February for a series of master classes and rehearsals, which will culminate in “Cecilia and Her World”, with two performances on February 26 & 27, 2022. Central to these concerts celebrating her choral works will be a newly-commissioned piece. These concerts will also include music she considers influential to her own style. McDowall won the British Composer Award for Choral Music in 2014 and, more recently, the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Works Collection in 2021. Her works are performed worldwide.
 
From Cecilia McDowall, “It is a real pleasure to write for a choir like Cleveland Chamber Choir with its passion for making choral music a vehicle for good, and I very much hope that the piece that we will create together will live up to those expectations. I am looking forward to starting work on it in the coming months and later to meeting the choir and hearing it sung.”
 
Additionally, several collegiate choirs will join us, all performing McDowall’s music. Prior to the concerts, McDowall and CCC Artistic Director Scott MacPherson will do master classes with these choirs. Each choir will sing one McDowall composition by themselves and join CCC for a final, massed choir performance of one of McDowall’s other works. In presenting this concert, CCC is building on a model that was successful in their fifth season: collaborating with school choirs in concert, which helps to show younger singers that their singing can be a lifelong profession and avocation, and that they are able to make music at an extraordinary level throughout their lives, should they wish to do so.
 
Lastly, our June 11 & 12, 2022 concerts, “World of Doubt, World of Faith” appropriately closes our season with music both questioning existence and demonstrating the resilience of the human race. Central to this program is Adam Roberts’ (Kent State University) multi-movement work for 16-part choir, viola and percussion called Book of Doubt/Book of Faith, setting secular, feminist “psalms” by poet Claire Schwartz that are relevant to our time and connected to Jewish history. The concerts will also feature a diverse repertoire of music that amplifies the voices of all, including composers traditionally underrepresented in the classical music world.