Tucson choir revisits two defining works for 20th anniversary

Tucson Chamber Artists was in its third season in 2006 when founder/music director Eric Holtan decided it was time to dance with Mozart.

The 30-voice professional choir, accompanied by a 26-member orchestra, performed Mozart’s Mass in C-minor.

That’s big boy repertoire, the kind that seasoned choirs twice the size of and far more seasoned than Holtan’s pull-off. It’s not repertoire that you do in year three when you’re still figuring it all out.

This weekend, the now 20-year-old ensemble, which changed its name to True Concord Voices & Orchestra in 2015, will revisit the C-minor Mass in “Mozart & Hagen: Two Important Encores.” The concert, which will be performed Friday, Jan. 26, through Sunday, Jan. 28, is part of the Tucson Desert Song Festival.

“When people think of Mozart, they often think of his Requiem, but his C-minor Mass is his other great unfinished masterpiece,” Holtan said last week. “It stands alongside the Requiem for its beauty and complexity and virtuosity. It’s an incredible piece of music. It seemed fitting in our 20th anniversary season that we would return to this piece.”

This will be True Concord’s third time performing the Mass, which Holtan has paired with an encore of Jocelyn Hagen’s multimedia choral work “The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.” True Concord, which performed the work in 2019, was among a consortium of 20 groups that commissioned Hagen to write the piece.

“Notebooks” uses writings from the famous Renaissance painter, inventor and scholar as the choral symphony’s text. Hagen incorporated da Vinci’s drawings into a video that’s synced to the voices and instruments. Audiences see the drawings come to life as the music unfolds.

“People were just spell-bound by it and not just because of the music,” Holtan recalled of that first performance four years ago. “The music was great, but then she took da Vinci’s drawings and sketches and animated them and digitized them and displayed them. She compiled these drawings and sketches along with his words to really celebrate the ingenuity and creativity in all of us. It’s exciting, it’s hope-filled and it’s really popular.”

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True Concord was one of the first ensembles to perform the work, which has since been performed 30 times worldwide.

This weekend’s encore will be a dress rehearsal of sorts for when True Concord goes into the studio this spring to record it along with Hagen’s choral symphony “Here I Am,” which True Concord commissioned in 2019. The ensemble performed the world premiere of that work last January.

The recording will be True Concord’s fourth as part of the Dorothy Dyer Vanek Fund for Excellence project. The ensemble’s first album, “Far in the Heavens,” was awarded a Grammy for composer Stephen Paulus, who died before the recording was released. “Far in the Heavens” was Paulus’s last major work.

In the spring, True Concord will release a recording of Jake Runestad’s Earth Symphony “Choral,” commissioned by the Tucson ensemble. The piece earned Runestad an Emmy award in 2022.

True Concord will perform “Mozart & Hagen” at 3 p.m. Friday at Valley Presbyterian Church, 2800 S. Camino del Sol in Green Valley; and at 7 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday at Catalina Foothills High School, 4300 E. Sunrise Drive. Tickets are $23.50-$63.50 through trueconcord.org.

Other Tucson Desert Song Festival events this weekend include mezzo-soprano Cecilia Duarte and Trio Chapultepec with percussionist Jesús Pacheco and Misael Barraza-Díaz on guitar in a Tucson Guitar Society recital at 7 p.m. Friday, Jan. 26, at the University of Arizona’s Holsclaw Hall, 1017 N. Olive Road. Tickets are $40 through the Guitar Society, tucsonguitarsociety.org.