The Tucson Girls Chorus will perform its 30th holiday concert Sunday, Dec. 13. It also may go down as its biggest yet.
Nearly 300 vocalists, including almost 100 alumni choristers, will pack the Fox Tucson Theatre stage for a concert of seasonal music that the group has performed over the years since Margie Kersey founded the Girls Chorus in 1985. They will be accompanied by a small ensemble that will include piano, violin, percussion and flute.
Kersey will return to the podium to lead the alumni choir while Girls Chorus Director Marcella Molina will conduct 10 other ensembles including the four Engagement Choirs created over the past two years to reach underserved girls downtown, in Sahuarita and on the northwest and south sides.
For the finale, Molina and Kersey will share conducting duties. Kersey will guide the alumni group set up in the audience while Molina conducts the other ensembles in “Homeward Bound,” the song that traditionally closes the holiday event.
“We wanted to show the present, the past and the future in one piece of music, which I think is beautiful,” said Molina, who has run the chorus for nine years.
This marks Kersey’s final return to the podium for the chorus. The 70-year-old, who is all-but-retired — she maintains a voice and piano studio with 34 students — said her appearance Sunday is a one-and-done event.
“I’m doing it to solidify the future and past,” said Kersey, who said she occupies her time these days with her 16 grandchildren, three great-grandchildren and working on her family’s genealogy. “I’m doing this so we can help pull the history of the choirs together.”
Kersey knows the history well. Back when she started the Girls Chorus, 63 girls auditioned. They put on their first concert in spring 1985.
By the time she retired in 2005, the ranks had swelled to 263 in five choirs, but within months of stepping down, the Tucson Girls Chorus was on the brink of dissolving. Membership shrank to 60 kids and the board and staff fled in droves.
“It was just dismal,” Kersey recalled last week. “I was concerned and everyone else was concerned that it would close.”
Molina, with a freshly minted University of Arizona doctoral degree, arrived in 2006 with the goal of reviving the organization as its artistic director. She was named director in 2010.
She recruited new members, expanding the chorus’s community outreach and re-established its place in Tucson’s musical landscape. Every year, the ranks grew; today, they have 230 girls in seven main choirs and the fledgling engagement choirs, which offers reduced tuition to the participants and incorporates the ensembles in some of the chorus’s bigger shows.
“Nine years ago when I started this and we were about to fold the organization, I never thought we would be in a position where we were be able to touch so many lives,” Molina said.
In addition to its local performances, the Girls Chorus has performed in New York City and abroad. Last summer, the 25-member Advanced Choir did a three-week tour of China: 14 concerts in 15 cities.
“And they just represented Tucson and the U.S. with such poise and artistry that everyone should be so proud of them,” Molina gushed. “It has been a wonderful year.”
