COVID-19 did a number on True Concord Voices & Orchestra.
Just as the pandemic was rearing its deadly head in March 2020, the professional ensemble had to call off its performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass.
Feeling optimistic, they penciled it in for the 2020-21 season.
That, also, did not happen.
“We felt we couldn’t serve the piece well with limited resources and doing it outdoors,” True Concord music director Eric Holtan said, referring to the ensemble’s 2020-21 bubble season of outdoor concerts.
This weekend, nearly two years to the day that it was supposed to be performed, True Concord is finally mounting Bach’s behemoth masterpiece, with three performances between Friday, March 25, and Sunday, March 27.
The timing, Holtan said, couldn’t be more right given the state of the world.
“To me it just reflects everything that we share in common with one another,” he said. “We’ve gone through this pandemic together and experienced all that it has wrought emotionally. This piece really speaks to that.”
True Concord Music Director Eric Holtan is bringing a 26-piece orchestra and 30 vocalists, including a dozen soloists, for this weekend’s Bach B Minor Mass.
In Bach’s Mass, Holtan hears suffering, death, new life, unadulterated joy, the heralding of faith and an urgent plea of peace — emotions that the world experienced together during and because of the pandemic.
“The power of music to enrich and move and
inspire and touch upon the emotions — this
piece does it in a really big way,” Holtan said. “It’s monumental. Now more than ever we need this music to reinforce that which we share in common, to bring about the hope and healing the world continues to need and to bring hope and joy and serenity and calm at what seems to be chaotic time in the world.”
True Concord will have 30 vocalists including a dozen soloists and 26 instrumentalists for the concert, which they will perform at 7 p.m. Friday at Valley Presbyterian Church, 2800 S. Camino Del Sol in Green Valley; and 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday at Catalina Foothills High School, 4300 E. Sunrise Drive. Tickets are $27 to $52 through trueconcord.org.
True Concord Voices & Orchestra performed Ukraine's national anthem at its concerts Feb. 25-27 as an act of solidarity with the besieged democracy under attack by Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine Feb. 24, a day before True Concord returned to the stage for the first time this year.
