Students in the University of Alabama at Birmingham Concert Choir will travel to Italy for a 10-day tour from June 4-13, with performances in Venice, Florence and Rome.
In Florence, the choir will perform the European premiere of Michael Trotta’s “Requiem,” a new 40-minute, multimovement masterwork for choir and orchestra. Student and faculty soloists will be featured in the performance. In addition to the “Requiem” premiere, the 45-member choir will perform a program highlighting choral works by other renowned American composers.
The world premiere of this entire work was given in October 2022 at the UAB Choral Masterworks Festival, in UAB’s Alys Stephens Performing Arts Center, says Associate Professor and Director of Choral Activities Brian Kittredge, DMA.
The work was professionally recorded by the UAB Department of Music at the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in Vestavia Hills, Alabama, and will be mastered and proposed to recording labels in the coming month, he says.
The Concert Choir, under the direction of Kittredge, is the premier choral ensemble at UAB, in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Music. It features approximately 50 auditioned singers from many disciplines across campus, and while a large percentage of the group are pursuing music studies, there are more than 20 other majors also represented in the ensemble.
The choir tours annually, most regularly in the United States. In 2018, the UAB Concert
Choir made its debut performance at Carnegie Hall in New York. This is not the first international tour for the UAB Concert Choir: In 2017, the choir performed in choral festivals in England and the Netherlands, and in 2014 they performed on a European summer tour, which included winning gold and silver medals in three categories at the eighth World Choir Games in Riga, Latvia.
“It is important to the UAB Department of Music and the choral program to find transformative experiences like this for our current and future students,” Kittredge said. “We are excited to be able to perform for new audiences and premiere this new work in Europe.”
The UAB Concert Choir has also released a recording, “Unceasing Love.”