New Seasons

Seattle Pro Musica Artistic Director and Conductor, Karen P. Thomas, offers this blogular tidbit for your enjoyment! - KS
 

Seattle Pro Musica's 38th season is a wrap, now that our May 2011 "Appear and Inspire" concerts have finished up. We've had a tremendous year of excellent concerts, including performing at the American Handel Festival in March - we expect to have some good recordings from our 2010-11 season available soon!

And now, on to 2011-12 and preparations for the new repertoire and events coming up. It's interesting to note that in two years, the 2012-13 season, we will celebrate the 40th anniversary of Seattle Pro Musica and my 25th anniversary as conductor of the group. I was reminded of this while reading the latest blog posting by my colleague Richard Sparks, who is the founding conductor of Seattle Pro Musica. He recently visited Seattle from Texas, where he now conducts at the University of North Texas. His latest blog contains musings on the various connections between the two choirs he founded here - Seattle Pro Musica and Choral Arts. The latter is now conducted by the excellent Robert Bode, who is on faculty at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.  An interesting further connection here is that I've recently received a commission from Choral Arts to write a new piece for them for May 2012 - am very much looking forward to getting started on that!

One of the most rewarding season-ending events for me, and for many other choral conductors and administrators from around the country, is the annual Chorus America Conference held each year in June. The conference begins this Wednesday, June 8, in one of my favorite cities - San Francisco. Looking forward to connecting with many friends and colleagues over the next week, and to meeting new colleagues. Among the exciting offerings are concerts by the host choirs Chanticleer and the San Francisco Girls Chorus. It will be wonderful to hear both of these excellent groups, and to reconnect with the SFGC and their conductor Susan McMane, who performed my "How can I keep from singing" in 2009.

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Karen P. Thomas is the Artistic Director of Seattle Pro Musica, with whom she has produced seven critically-acclaimed CD recordings, and has received the Margaret Hillis Choral Excellence Award and the ASCAP-Chorus America Award. Her compositions are performed internationally, and she has been lauded for her “charismatic...magnetic podium presence.” She has received awards from the NEA, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and ASCAP, among others.  She would rather be hiking than blogging.