Elmhurst College will present its Fall Choral Concert on Sunday, November 11, at 2:00 p.m. in Hammerschmidt Memorial Chapel.
The concert will feature the Concert Choir, Chamber Singers, Women’s Chorus and a special guest, the Elmhurst College Gospel Choir. The groups will perform a wide variety of music, including works by Lloyd Pfautsch, F. Melius Christiansen, Richard Smallwood and others. The concert is free and open to the public.
The Chamber Singers group, directed by Susan Moninger, is an auditioned select ensemble that performs madrigal and other forms of challenging Renaissance and classical literature. This group often shares the holiday spirit by singing for corporate and private events, and has appeared on the NBC Channel 5 Sunday morning news program.
Moninger is a music professor and director of student choral activities at Elmhurst College. She is the co-founder and director of Showchoir Camps of America, and is an active clinician and adjudicator in the United States, Canada and Europe.
The Elmhurst College Concert Choir, also directed by Moninger, is an auditioned group of students from a variety of majors who sing traditional and contemporary choral music. The Concert Choir maintains a long-standing tradition of touring throughout the United States in churches and schools. The group recently toured in New York, St. Louis and Tennessee. They have sung works by Sergei Prokofiev with the Chicago Sinfonietta at Orchestra Hall, performed for Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings Symphony at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, and traveled to Prague to perform Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms with the Chicago Children’s Choir and the Czech National Orchestra. Recent credits also include performing with the Chicago Pops Orchestra for the Distant Worlds, Final Fantasy Concert at the Rosemont Horizon Theater and recording for the newest Distant Worlds CD with the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra.
The Women’s Chorus, directed by Donna Peterson Tallman, is an auditioned select group of women from a variety of majors who sing various styles of literature, including Renaissance, classical and twentieth century. Tallman has held faculty positions in music education at Northern Illinois University and was director of Music Education at Illinois Benedictine College.
The Elmhurst College Gospel Choir was founded by Christa Dykes in the Spring of 2010. The purpose of the choir is to serve God while encouraging and educating others through song that highlights the gospel message.