A Happy Season Ending

We had a great time at our Diverse Voices concert and we hope you did too if you were able to attend Saturday. If you missed the concert, you missed dancing students and an erhu-playing principal from the Rochester Chinese School, an intergenerational chorus of Chinese singers teaching the audience "Two Tigers" (a Chinese version of our more familiar "Are You Sleeping?"), some high-spirited call-and-response gospel singing with the Armor of God Gospel choir, a survey of 50 years of popular and very catchy Indian music provided by the Jai Ho group of Rochester Vidhyalaya, stirring poetry from STEM academy students, well-coached by their English teacher Mr. Edwards, poems about struggle, unity and diversity, and hope, and lastly, after a quick lesson with three brave audience volunteers, the quick-stepping bamboo dance Tinikling from members of the Philippine-American Association. Dancers and bamboo strikers alike were out of breath after those 4.5 minutes!

We prefaced the performances of our guests with a set choral music showcasing the Minnesota choral tradition. We sang music of composers from F. Melius Christianson through Dominick Argento and Stephen Paulus to rising star Jake Runestad and including Rene' Clausen, Daniel Kallman, Carol Barnett and Alf Houkom. We closed the concert with all performers back on stage and leading the audience in singing America the Beautiful.

Portions of this concert will be reprised at our annual Community Sing June 7, 7:00 pm, Peace Plaza. Don't miss it!