True Concord performing world premiere of contest winner's work

True Concord Voices & Orchestra will perform the world premiere of the winning composition in its third annual Stephen Paulus Emerging Composers Competition.

And for guest conductor Bruce Chamberlain, this weekend’s concerts will feel like old home week.

The winning composer, Tom Peterson, is a graduate student at the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music. Peterson, who lives in Phoenix and is music director at Christ Church of the Ascension in Paradise Valley, is finishing up his doctoral degree and was once Chamberlain’s student.

Peterson’s winning work, “Being Many, Seeming One,” sets the text from Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 8, which was the inspiration for True Concord’s name.

“If the true concord of well-tuned sounds / By unions married, do offend thine ear / They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds / In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.”

The 16-year-old professional choir changed its name from Tucson Chamber Artists in 2015.

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Peterson’s piece was selected by Grammy-nominated Minnesota conductor Dale Warland from 25 blind submissions. None of the works was signed, which meant that Warland had no idea who composed them or where they were from, True Concord Founder and Music Director Eric Holtan said.

“Out of those 25 submissions, Dale chooses Tom Peterson from Arizona,” Chamberlain said with a chuckle. “It was totally surprising.”

Chamberlain is no stranger to True Concord audiences. The longtime Tucson choral director, who also leads the Tucson Symphony Orchestra Chorus, worked with Holtan on two of True Concord’s most ambitious concerts: Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” in early 2017 as part of the Tucson Desert Song Festival and Verdi’s Requiem in February 2018. Both events featured the UA’s Arizona Choir, which Chamberlain led until he retired from the UA in spring 2018.

“Shakespeare In Song,” which opens True Concord’s 16th season, is all about Shakespeare, including Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Serenade to Music,” featuring 16 vocal soloists and text from “The Merchant of Venice.” Also on the program Ned Rorem’s “Two Shakespearean Songs: Dirge, Live With Me”; Nils Lindberg’s “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day”; and Paul Mealor’s “Sounds and Sweet Airs.”

Chamberlain will lead True Concord in four performances this weekend, kicking off with a special concert in Scottsdale with the Pinnacle Presbyterian Church on Thursday, Oct. 10, before taking the concert to Green Valley on Friday, Oct. 11.

True Concord also will perform Bach’s B Minor Mass at the Scottsdale church next March as part of Pinnacle Presbyterian’s music series.