Tucson Masterworks Chorale has new leader as it opens season

Tucson Masterworks Chorale will introduce its new conductor on Sunday, Nov. 19, when it opens its 68th season with “Songs of Poetry and Love.”

The choir in July tapped Yoojin Muhn as its artistic director, replacing Jonathan Kim, who took a university teaching job in Wisconsin.

Muhn, who also serves as the music director at Oro Valley’s Vistoso Community Church, will lead the choir in works that express love and poetry through choral music. The program includes Brahms’ “Neue Liebeslieder-Walzer” (New Love-Song Waltzes), featuring a quartet of soloists and two pianists; Eric Whitacre’s “Five Hebrew Love Songs,” with a solo violinist; Randall Thompson’s “Frostiana,” which sets seven of Robert Frost’s poems; Harold Darke’s “In the Bleak Midwinter”; and John Rutter’s “What Sweeter Music.”

Muhn, a native of Seoul, South Korea, started her music career as a church pianist when she was 12.

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She later studied composition at SookMyung Women’s University in Seoul, and earned her master’s degree in sacred music from Westminster Choir College, where she graduated with distinction. She also earned a master’s degree in choral conducting from the University of Cincinnati and a doctorate of musical arts in choral music from the University of Southern California. While there, she directed the Oriana women’s chorus and led the concert choir as an assistant director.

Before coming to Tucson, Muhn was on the conducting faculty at Southwestern A/G University in Texas.

Sunday’s concert is the second time Masterworks Chorale will perform the program; they took it to SaddleBrooke on Nov. 11.