Apollo Chorus rings in America’s 250th with eclectic program
America was just approaching its 100th birthday when the Apollo Chorus was founded in 1872, and it seemed only fitting that the city’s oldest performing arts organization should commemorate the country’s 250th as it approaches this summer.
Led by the indefatigable Stephen Alltop, the storied volunteer ensemble offered an inspiring program, “America Sings,” at St. Michael Catholic Church in Old Town on Friday night, which captured both the optimism and complexity of the nation’s history.
The concert began with two traditional hymns, William Billings’ “Now Shall My Inward Joys Arise” and “Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal” in Alice Parker’s well-known arrangement, Alltop and the Chorus projecting their direct, forthright sentiment.
These were followed by four movements from Illinois composer Damien Geter’s An African American Requiem.Geter inventively insperses spirituals with the text of the Latin Mass for the dead. The Apollo Chorus, along with the Chicago Philharmonic, gave this 90-minute score its Midwest premiere last October as part of the 2025 Ear Taxi Festival.
Tenor Sean Mallory launched “There’s a Man Goin’ Round/Liber Scriptus” with a stirring solo, answered in kind by mezzo Miranda Stelter, with troubled blues harmonies undergirding the spiritual as it melds with the Latin text. The Chorus sang with sibilant articulation in the agitated “Confutatis.”
In Geter’s “Lacrimosa,” “The Star-Spangled Banner” is cast in the minor mode as an accompanying line in something of an Ivesian mashup. The melody stops abruptly before the climactic word “free” and omits it, an effectively unexpected move on a first hearing that came to feel gimmicky in its multiple repetitions. Assistant conductor Cody Michael Bradley deftly handled the dense piano reduction.
The Geter selections concluded with the a cappella “Agnus Dei,” its gentle opening giving way to jazzy inflections before closing on a sustained, quiet hum on the word “Eternam.” Moses Hogan’s arrangement of “We Shall Walk Through the Valley of Peace” followed, offering a note of inward consolation.
As a brief interlude, baritone Warnell Berry sang Justin Holland’s “Dream Faces,” accompanied on guitar by Scott Hare. Holland was a black guitarist and music teacher who also escorted escaping slaves on the Underground Railroad and moved in the same activist circles as Frederick Douglass. Berry conveyed the Schubertian wistfulness of this simple song’s earnest expression, a welcome reminder of America’s own 19th-century art song tradition.
Three works from living American composers followed. Dale Trumbore’s enigmatic “Spiritus Mundi” sets a naturalistic text by Amy Fleury with such evocative lines as, “Hear the soft explosions of all that is tilled under,/ a scumble of closes cleaved by the blade.” The close harmonies of Eric Whitacre’s “All Seems Beautiful to Me,” a Walt Whiman poem, captured the Transcendentalist’s reflective self-intimacy, and Elaine Hagenberg’s “Alleluia” skipped with jubilant mixed meters under Alltop’s direction.
By way of another interlude, Alltop and Bradley offered the boisterous “American Dance No. 3” for four hands by Henry Gilbert (1868-1928), showing that Scott Joplin was not the only ragtime composer of that era.
The evening ended with two affecting contemporary works. Lin-Manuel Miranda composed “Found/Tonight” for the student-led March for Our Lives campaign against school shootings, its warm harmonies and creative lyrics representing America’s Broadway tradition in Jacob Narverud’s elegant arrangement. The fine solo quartet of Mitchell Barrett, Kali Jankovich, Joe Shacter, and Scott Schneider felt like they could have easily stepped out of a Broadway cast.
The night finished with Shawn Kirchner’s “Sweet Rivers,” a rousing hymn that closed the brief program on a note of forward-looking hopefulness.
The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Saturday at First United Church of Oak Park. apollochorus.org
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