Singers gear up for New England tour

ORONO – Seventy members of the University Singers will devote a week of their spring break to performances and student recruitment efforts as part of their annual New England tour, from March 19 to 25.

The singers, under the direction of Dennis Cox, professor of music, will give four high school assembly concerts and an evening concert in five Maine communities before continuing the tour in New Hampshire and Vermont.

This year’s excursion will end in Montreal, where the students will give an informal performance at Notre Dame Cathedral, one of the largest cathedrals in North America. By the time they perform there the singers will have given 15 performances in five days.

“For the students, this is an opportunity to repeat in different contexts the performance of materials they have learned,” Cox said. “Like athletic teams performing in a tournament, the University Singers on tour become an even better professional performing ensemble.”

In addition, University Singers tours have a history of recruiting prospective students to the University of Maine. The group has been touring regionally for more than 30 years.

Featured on the tour program is the performance of “Holocaust Cantata,” by Donald McCullogh. The cantata is based on the stories and music of the concentration camps. McCullough, music director of the Master Chorale of Washington, spent a year researching the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The 117 songs written in captivity by Polish composer Jozef Kropinski, and 35 songs texts and 52 poems by another Polish prisoner, Kazimierz Wojtowicz, form the basis of the work that premiered at the Kennedy Center in 1998. UMaine’s performance of the cantata during evening concerts on the tour will include a narrator and soloists.

Another highlight of the repertoire is “Voyager’s Promise,” by Judith (Labbee) Pancoast, an alumnus of the University Singers, who graduated from UMaine in 1983.