Regina, Canada

“One of the most productive, creative and efficient rehearsals of my life!” Stephen Hatfield, Flying Colours composer

Flying Colours is a masque of about twenty minutes in length, in which the story is told through ritualized movement and costume, as well as through music. The piece, a threeway commission, was also written for Joe Ohrt and his Central Bucks High School-West Chamber Choir, and Eric Wilkinson and the Sumpter High School Choir. Flying Colours is a parable of suspicion and conflict. Four tribes, each with their own standards of costume and custom, concentrate so much on each other’s differences that they miss how their four tribal chants create a lovely texture when sung simultaneously. Tensions mount amidst escalating skirmishes and broken treaties until there is war, destruction, an afterlife of haunted grief, and a closing section that suggests both how we never learn, and yet at the same time how we must. The Saskatoon Children’s Choir performed the Saskatchewan premiere of Flying Colours in Regina on May 12, 2008.  This project also involved a filming project, led by Ron Berntson, resulting in a wild and wooly DVD of Stephen Hatfield’s brilliant composition.

St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada

“It will stay with you the rest of your life!” Michael McGlynn, Ireland

Festival 500 Sharing the Voices is a celebrated international biennial festival of choral music, which takes place in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador over the course of one full week. While it is a non-competitive festival, choirs are required to go through an audition process and must be invited to participate. Choirs are given the opportunity to perform and participate in various concerts, workshops, clinics and master classes – all delivered by world leaders in their respective fields. The Saskatoon Children’s Choir was a proud participant in July 2007.

Still We Rise!

In December 2006, the choir launched their  “Still We Rise!” project, in support of the global fight against HIV and AIDS. In association with this project, the choir commissioned Yo Te Nombro Libertad from Peter Tiefenbach and premiered it at Festival 500 in St. John’s Newfoundland in July 2007. The premiere performance of this piece brought the audience to its feet for a prolonged ovation.  It continues, to this day, to be the “signature composition” of the Saskatoon Children’s Choir.

“A song is like a pebble cast in a pond, the ripples spreading slowly but surely.” Erkki Pohjola, Founder of Songbridge and director of Tapiola Choir in Finland

The “Eternity Stone Project” was launched in 2006. Stones and messages from around the world were collected and held by choristers and audience members during performances of Bojesen’s Eternity. The stones, including a piece of the Berlin Wall and a stone from Terezín, served as tangible reminders of our connection to all of humanity.

Saskatoon, Regina and Winnipeg, Canada

To commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, the Saskatoon Children’s Choir presented a poignant production of the children’s opera Brundibár, first performed by the children internees of the Nazi concentration camp of Terezín. The choir performed Brundibár to eleven sold-out audiences in Saskatoon, Regina, and Winnipeg. This project connected choristers to history and to a world beyond their borders, as they met with two Holocaust survivors who performed in the original productions.

The resulting CBC Radio recording (Shauna Powers, producer and Chris Haynes, sound engineer) received the national CBC award for best documentary in 2005.

The opera Brundibár was written by a Jewish Czech composer Hans Krása in 1938. In 1942, he was deported to Terezín (or Theresienstadt), a ghetto created by the Nazis to amass European Jews in one location prior to transportation to the East for the “final solution”. In Terezín, Krása’s opera Brundibár was performed more than fifty times by children and musicians from the ghetto. During the rehearsals and performances, as the transports to the East were in progress, there was a constant stream of new performers, replacing the previous performers who were being shipped to Auschwitz for extermination.

The opera itself is a simple story about friendship, good winning over evil and overcoming bullies. The final chorus of the opera goes like this: “Victory spectacular, goodbye to Brundibár, never afraid of him, battle won, war is done, now we are number one. Our song is strong and clear, our voices without fear, what a phenomenon. Whoever loves justice and will defend it and is not afraid is our friend and may play with us”.

What is particularly significant and moving is the historical context in which it was originally performed – in a concentration camp, under the noses of the Nazis, who either were not listening or did not see the significance of the opera’s lyrics. The opera speaks to today’s children as well. It shows that if we pull together, we can overcome even the meanest bully.

Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China

The Songbridge Concept

Songbridge is one of the most exciting concepts to come to life in the world of international choral music. Founded by choral music icon Professor Erkki Pohjola of Finland as a logical culmination of his thirty-one year tenure as founder and conductor of the Tapiola Choir, the Songbridge concept brings together leading youth choirs and choral composers from around the world to further global peace and understanding in an artistically rich atmosphere.

Songbridge combines the commissioned choral compositions of prominent international composers with the world choral artistry of stellar choirs from their countries. Each year the Songbridge choirs are chosen by an international jury, from the seventy-country International Federation of Choral Music (IFCM), and gather at a world choral symposium for 4-5 days. In that special setting young singers from different countries live, work and play together in community, learning about each others’ culture and music, developing friendships and mutual respect. After several days of intense rehearsal, they bring to joint performance their newly commissioned works and folk music from each culture represented in the Songbridge.Choirs are chosen not only for their artistic excellence, but also for their demonstrated understanding that music has the capacity to overcome divisions between people and nations.

In 2005, the four featured Songbridge choirs were the Saskatoon Children’s Choir (Canada),  the Tapiola Choir (Finland), the University of Pretoria Jacaranda Choir (South Africa), and the Republic of China National Children’s Choir. Our commission, by Toronto composer Peter Tiefenbach, is entitled “Out of the Stars.”