You know you’re performing something special when weeks before your concert the demand for tickets is so high you have to add a performance to the three you already planned to do.
Such is the story with Grammy-nominated True Concord Voices & Orchestra, which added a fourth concert to its run of “Mozart Requiem, From Darkness to Light.”
“This is a first. And these are big venues for us,” says True Concord Music Director Eric Holtan. “And we’ve never gotten to the point where we’ve had to add a concert because they filled up so quickly.”
True Concord added a matinee concert on Saturday, March 30 — it already had scheduled an evening performance Saturday — at Catalina Foothills High School. The ensemble opens the run in Green Valley on Friday, March 29.
This is the 15-year-old choir’s fourth go-around with the Requiem, which the group, under Holtan’s baton, last performed in 2015 when it made its New York debut as part of the city’s 9/11 commemorations. The piece was part of a concert anchored by Stephen Paulus’ “Prayers and Remembrances,” a work True Concord commissioned from the composer in 2011 to mark the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
Holtan said the Mozart Requiem has wide appeal among audiences in part because it is performed each year on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. But interest in this weekend’s concerts also could be a spinoff from True Concord’s sold-out run last month of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.
“In my experience, there are people who are Bach devotees and there are people who just can’t stand Bach. But everybody loves Mozart; it’s universal,” Holtan said, adding that people also are intrigued by the Requiem and its history.
Mozart died in late 1791 before he finished composing the Requiem. His associate Franz Xaver Süssmayr completed the piece, which went on to become one of Mozart’s biggest works and one of his most dramatic.
This weekend’s concert also will include Morten Lauridsen’s “Lux Aeterna” (Eternal Light), composed in response to Lauridsen’s mother’s death. Instead of a somber reflection, the piece from the five-time Grammy-nominated composer turns his “grief into a luminous work of radiant sound based on references to light” drawn from sacred Latin texts, according to True Concord’s notes on the work.
“As I tell audiences, every single time this piece is done, if you can get to that deep, personal space, it’s almost like a meditation, where you can reflect on those things that are important to you, that bring light into your life,” Lauridsen said in a written statement.
The 76-year-old composer, who teaches at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, will join Holtan in pre-concert talks before each of this weekend’s four concerts, Holtan said. Lauridsen, a classically-trained pianist, also will perform an encore — the “Sure on this Shining Night” movement of his 2005 choral work “Nocturnes.”
“He’s a big deal,” Holtan said of Lauridsen. “I’m genuinely excited he can be with us for these concerts.”
