True Concord adds it voice to Beethoven bash

Beethoven wrote very little in the way of choral works, which gives Tucson’s Grammy-nominated choir True Concord very little wiggle room to get in on the Beethoven at 250 party.

But it also gives the ensemble the local lock on the few choral works Beethoven composed, including his “Choral Fantasy” and Mass in C major — two works the True Concord Voices & Orchestra will perform starting Friday, Feb. 21.

True Concord Music Director Eric Holtan has assembled an orchestra of 30 and choir of 33 to perform the works, which anchor a program that also includes Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody with soloist Emily Marvosh.

Holtan said conducting the C Major Mass takes him back to graduate school in Iowa. It was the first piece he studied as a master’s student and Holtan said he remembers thinking, “I didn’t know they wrote music like this.”

“It’s really exciting and charming music and while it lives in the shadow of the ‘Missa solemnis,’ it is in its own right a masterpiece,” Holtan said.

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“Beethoven & Goethe” is True Concord’s contribution to the citywide Beethoven focus commemorating the composer’s 250th birthday. Tucson Symphony Orchestra this season is checking the boxes on all but one of Beethoven’s symphonies while Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra is filling in that blank with Symphony No. 9 in late April.

Holtan paired the C Major Mass with Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, which he compared to the Symphony No. 9 — the first symphony that featured vocals.

“The Choral Fantasy is like a piano concerto with choir,” he said.

The Brahms Rhapsody is set to the text of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem “Harzreise im Winter.”