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We are gearing up for our fall concert at EIU, which features women creators exclusively. We then move onto Beethoven’s 9th in collaboration with Bradley University and Illinois Central College, presented at the Doudna Fine Arts Center and with the Heartland Festival Orchestra in Peoria (everybody loves choir tour!). For the grand finale, we are performing Poulenc’s iconic Gloria with the Charleston High School Advanced Chorus and the East Central Chorale, in addition to other holiday favorites. Here’s to a season of first-class music!

We had a busy year at EIU: I conducted two premieres of my own arrangements (Pinkham Christmas Cantata orchestral arrangement, Marybeth Kurnat epitaph for a romantic woman orchestral arrangement), hosted several guest composers and lecturers, we did a fabulous collaboration with Chanticleer when they visited on their tour, a cohort of choir students went to New York to work with Eric Whitacre at Lincoln Center, and the students gave many compelling performances showcasing their substantial growth and successful hard work. What wonderful experiences!

My work as Director of Choral Activities at Eastern Illinois University has brought the opportunity for me to conduct two new choral-orchestral arrangements of stalwart pieces in the repertoire: Louis Vierne’s Kyrie from Messe Solennelle and Daniel Pinkham’s Christmas Cantata.

Another positive review for the Merton College Choir’s recording of Venables’ Requiem and the orchestrated Howells anthems:

“This inspired recording project – a synthesis of musical intersections and connections, repertoire new and old, arrangements and homages – has been so carefully conceived and knitted together that it’s a winner before you even hear a note. Once you do, however, it only gets better….The whole recording feels like an exercise in the play of musical light and shade, arrangements picking out new moments in silhouette, recessing others into shadow. Take Howells’s Like as the hart, for example: in Howard Eckdahl’s orchestration the text’s water-brooks swirl and eddy with new currents, a reflective pool beneath the blended choral voices.”

https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/howells-anthems-for-choir-and-orchestra-venables-requiem

https://www.operaamerica.org/r/grants-awards/9221/awards-for-digital-excellence-in-opera

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2022/Oct/Venables-requiem-DCD34252.htm

Uncommon Voices, a groundbreaking album of music by women composers of Eastern Europe recorded by Macedonian pianist Natasha Stojanovska, has been released on the Navona Label in collaboration with Parma Recordings, Kosmologia, and engineered by GRAMMY-winning Aphorism studios. I had the pleasure of working as a Recording Session Producer alongside the late Carmen-Helena Téllez. https://www.navonarecords.com/catalog/nv6440/