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The Los Angeles Master Chorale (pictured) featured two world premieres at its Choose Something Like A Star concert in Walt Disney Concert Hall on February 12. VOYAGER, by California native Matthew Brown, is inspired by the 1977 launch of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts and the individuals involved in the scientific journey. The work also explores human life and the shared experience of existing on planet Earth. Inspired by her mother’s writing, Diana Syrse composed Alas de noche while living between Venice and Mexico. The piece composed for choir, soloists, objects, and percussion takes the sounds from a Venetian soundscape and sounds of a hospital in Mexico City to reflect a mother’s love for a daughter looking to fulfill her dreams. On February 23, Kitka premiered Karmina Šilec’s, BABA: The Life and Death of Stana. The new opera, commissioned by the Oakland, California-based women’s ensemble is inspired by the lives of Balkan sworn virgins, a tradition that leads women to take vows of chastity and celibacy and live as men. BABA brings to light a disappearing practice of women sacrificing their sexuality and transforming themselves into men as a means of survival and explores themes of gender, otherness, choice, virginity, sexual identity, and the complexities of interpreting these Balkan gender-transformation stories through a contemporary, liberal, Western gaze.

After a two-year postponement due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Choral Artists of Sarasota presented the premiere of Listen to the Earth on April 22, 2022. Listen to the Earth is a symphonic choral cantata by James Grant. Its premiere performance incorporated images and video of the Apollo 11 lift-off and the astronauts’ view of Earth from space.

The Crossing made its Cincinnati debut on February 24 at the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) national conference with the premiere of The Absence, Remember by Jennifer Higdon. The new work based on a poem by Athena Kildegaard is ACDA’s 2023 Raymond W. Brock Memorial Commission.

On December 3, Pacific Chorale performed the world premiere of Saunder Choi’s Meet Me for Noche Buena. The work commissioned by the Costa Mesa, California-based choir is sung in Tagalog and set to a poem by San Mateo County, California poet laureate and Filipino immigrant Aileen Cassinetto.

On March 12, the Phoenix Boys Choir (PBC) premiered Journey by Jeffrey Cobb and The Spirit of Adventure by Ryan Gunderson as part of PBC Playlist –75 Years of Song, a pops concert series celebrating the organization’s 75th anniversary. Cobb and Gunderson’s pieces were written for PBC’s New Works Rising competition and selected as the first and second prize winners from a pool of more than 90 entries.

Washington DC-based theater company IN Series and the Heritage Signature Chorale collaborated to present the first staging of the 1930s choral oratorio by Nathaniel Dett, The Ordering of Moses, on February 4. The collaboration featured musicians, dancers, and visual artists to present the spiritual work that helped fuel the American civil rights movement. u