(Credit: Dessoff Choir) The Dessoff Choirs is set to open its 100th anniversary season with Brahms’ German Requiem. The performance, which will be led by Music Director Malcolm J. Merriweather will be held on Nov. 2, 2024, at The Town Hall. According to the ensemble, this program holds special significance as Brahms and Otto Dessoff were friends. Brahms provided Dessoff {…}
The Dessoff Choirs is set to conclude its 2023-24 season with “Annelies.” The concert, which will be led by Music Director Malcolm J. Merriweather, will showcase the piece by British composer James Whitbourn and soloist soprano Nola Richardson. The piece was scored for soprano, chorus, and chamber ensemble to Melanie Challenger’s libretto of extracts from “The Diary of Anne Frank.” The {…}
(Credit: Stephanie Berger) The Dessoff Choirs will open its 2022-23 season with the North American premiere of “Duruflé and Lusitano.” The concert will feature music by the first known Black composer to be published, Vicente Lusitano (1520-61), and the last Impressionist composer, Maurice Duruflé (1902-86). Dessoff’s Music Director Malcolm J. Merriweather will conduct the choirs along with soloists mezzo-soprano Lucia {…}
The Dessoff Choirs announced its 2022-23 season. The season includes four concerts and a CD release of “Credo & Simon Bore the Cross” by composer and contributor to the civil rights movement, Margaret Bonds (1913-1972). Music Director Malcolm J. Merriweather conducts. The first concert “Duruflé & Lusitano” features Maurice Duruflé’s “Requiem” and Motets and Madrigals by Vicente Lusitano (1520-1561), the {…}
New York-based Dessoff Choirs has announced its 2021-22 season. The season kicks off with “Considering Matthew Shepard,” a three-part fusion oratorio about the young, gay student who was kidnapped, tortured, and left to die. The work features texts by Hildegard of Bingen, Lesléa Newman, Michael Dennis Browne, and Rumi as well as passages from Matthew’s personal journal and the words {…}
The Dessoff Choirs is set to begin its 94th season with Requiem for Whitman. The concert, inspired by the American poet and journalist Walt Whitman, will showcase music by Bach, Schuman, Pizzetti, as well as the world premiere of a newly commissioned Whitman-inspired work by contemporary composer Douglas Geers. The program will include William Schuman’s “The Carols of Death,” a {…}