"Friends From Near and Far"

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (5 February 2019) — Acclaimed young choristers of the bay will join forces with the most exemplary voices of Europe to create an unforgettable night of beautiful harmonies, including a newly commissioned piece that commemorates last year’s devastating California wildfires, when the Ragazzi Boys Chorus shares the stage with the girls of iSing Silicon Valley and the Copenhagen Girls’ Choir in Friends From Near and Far. One of the Bay Area’s premiere arts organizations for boys, Ragazzi Boys Chorus has committed itself to excellence in musical performance and education for over 30 years. The award-winning choral organization iSing Silicon Valley brings together girls from diverse backgrounds to unite their voices in harmony and change the world through song. Joining the two Bay Area Peninsula groups will be the Copenhagen Girls’ Choir, Denmark’s leading girls chorus, internationally renowned for its broad repertoire and meticulously trained voices. This recital offers music-lovers a unique opportunity to see the boys chorus perform alongside two lauded girls choirs, during an evening of transcendent music. Friends From Near and Far will be performed 8:00pm, Saturday, March 23, 2019 at St. Ignatius Church, 650 Parker Ave, San Francisco. For tickets (Adults: $20, Children/Students: FREE) or more information, visit http://isingsv.com/calendar/ or call 650-342-8785.

The performance will feature Kim Nyberg’s Gallop of Fire in remembrance of all that was lost in the wildfires that ravaged California last year. The spring concert will also include Salut Printemps by Claude Debussy; Moses Hogan’s arrangement of the spiritual Glory, Glory, Glory to the Newborn King; O Lieber Herre Gott by Heinrich Schütz; and Kim André Arnesen’s setting of Flight Song. The concert will culminate in a finale of Panis Angelicus performed by all three groups.

The Copenhagen Girls’ Choir will perform the newly commissioned Gallop of Fire by composer Kim Nyberg and Australian poet Marie E.J. Pitts to commemorate last year’s devastating California wildfires. Nyberg’s compositions are often described as a mix between classical composition music and Scandinavian folk music, with the rounded beat of Eastern European music. This distinctive expression has led to countless awards and accolades for the Danish music maker.

Ragazzi Boys Chorus and iSing will come together in a performance of Flight Song, the first collaboration between Norwegian composer Kim André Arnesen and Welsh poet Euan Tait. The imagery of the piece paints a compelling picture of music, drawing out each singer’s hidden song, unfolding life stories, and deep longings. Woven throughout the piece is the romantic notion that music making is the song of new life, fragile as the fall of a feather.

Celebrating the season change, iSing will perform Claude Debussy’s Salut Printemps, an ode to nature’s colorful reawakening in the spring. Written by Debussy at the age of 20, Salut Printemps mirrors the atmosphere seen in French impressionist painter Claude Monet’s works with a light, fresh, and sentimental mood.

Ragazzi Boys Chorus will perform Glory, Glory, Glory to the Newborn King by Moses Hogan. An American composer and arranger of choral music, Hogan is best known for his settings of African-American spirituals. A pianist, conductor, and arranger of international renown, his most famous work was perhaps The Oxford Book of Spirituals created in 2002.

Ragazzi Boys Chorus will also perform Heinrich Schütz’s (1585-1672) O Lieber Herre Gott from the first book of Kleine Geistliche Konzerte published in 1639. Schütz’s musical expression of joy is unmatched by any other composer of the same period, with his strettoed crescendos on the “Alleluias” and final statements of psalm settings achieving new heights of emotion. Accompanying the chorus on cello will be Brian Wu, a current member of Ragazzi.

All three choral groups will join in the final performance of Panis Angelicus by composer and musician César Franck. An excerpt from the hymn “Sacris solemniis” by Saint Thomas Aquinas, Franck set the lyrics to his own original composition to create a masterpiece that has prevailed throughout the ages.

Peninsula-based Ragazzi Boys Chorus is one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s premiere music and performance organizations for boys. Currently, there are more than 250 singers from over 100 schools in 30+ Bay Area communities participating in the program. Ragazzi means “boys” in Italian and is the term used in opera to refer to children’s voices. Ragazzi has performed with the San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Symphony, Opera San Jose, West Bay Opera, Symphony Silicon Valley, Masterworks Chorale, and the Stanford University Symphonic Chorus among others. The group has toured throughout the United States and internationally. In 1999, Ragazzi was honored for its contribution to the San Francisco Symphony’s triple Grammy Award-winning recording of Stravinsky’s Perséphone, and has five CDs available: A Holiday Collection, Canciones de Alabanza, Magnificat: My Spirit Rejoices, Splendors of the Italian Baroque, and I Dream A World.

Founded in 2013, iSing Silicon Valley brings together more than 300 of the best young female singers in the Silicon Valley, provides them with a rigorous, “whole self in” musical education, and guides them as they build and transform community through song. In 2018, this bright young choral education organization moved on to both national and international stages: iSing won Chorus America’s prestigious Dale Warland Singers Commission Award for a work to be premiered later this Spring; iSing also competed in the 8th International Robert Schumann Choral Competition and came away with the Grand Prize.

The Copenhagen Girls’ Choir is one of Denmark’s most lauded choirs for young women. Founded in 1973 and based at the Copenhagen Municipal Choir School, the Girls’ Choir consists of girls from grade 6-9, with nearly 130 members. Striving for a balance between challenging and immediately accessible, the choir incorporates a broad repertoire, with a special focus on new and popular music. The group is characterized by its homogeneous sound, resulting from meticulous training and similar age groups. The Copenhagen Girls’ Choir has toured throughout the world, performing in the U.S., Canada, China, Iceland, and most of Europe. Acting as ambassadors for the city of Copenhagen and for Danish cultural life, the Choir has been recognized for its joy and never-failing enthusiasm.