Chicago Children’s Choir set to sing its way through Italy

The Chicago Children’s Choir is revving up to sing its way through Italy in the coming week, embarking on an action-packed nine-day performance tour (July 4 – 13), that will take it to six cities, including stops at the world-renowned Ravenna and Ravello music festivals.

Led by Josephine Lee, its president and artistic director, the Choir’s Voice of Chicago ensemble — the most elite of several different programs operating under the organization’s banner — will travel with 69 singers ages 13 through 18, a band of its own (piano accompanist, bass, drums, guitar and keys and drums), plus staff chaperones and parents who can make the trip.

The teens, many of whom have already traveled to Cuba, India and beyond with the choir, will draw on the ensemble’s wide-ranging repertoire — an eclectic mix that ranges from opera, to choral works by Sergei Rachmaninoff and Leonard Bernstein, to world music rooted in South Africa and the Middle East, to spirituals and the songs of everyone from Curtis Mayfield and Sam Cooke to Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake and Leonard Cohen. (The choir last month appeared at Symphony Center with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a program of “Italian Opera Masterworks” conducted by maestro Riccardo Muti).

“Although we rarely go back to the same place twice, Italy is a natural,” said Lee, noting this will be the group’s third trip to the Mediterranean country. “We have such a strong connection with the Mutis (the conductor’s wife, Cristina Mazzavillani Muti, leads the Ravenna Festival). And we have established a relationship with a remarkable man, Erasmo Figini, an interior designer who has a beautiful hotel and foundation in the Lake Como area called Cometa. He has adopted and fostered many children, and has established a school dedicated to educating them about beauty, and training them in many vocational arts. He also believes that children need music in their life every day, and we will be doing a daylong workshop there with its recently established Coro di Oliver, a choir of 40 students modeled after the Chicago Children’s Choir, and developed with the support of Muti.”

As Muti said in a prepared statement: “I believe that music is one of the main ways through which to connect people of different cultures. And it is our duty to teach young musicians about what it means to be an artist — that it is a job that requires awareness, morality, passion and devotion to understanding other ways of living.”

Among the many impressive aspects of the ensemble is the fact that the singers memorize all the music, even when the lyrics are in a foreign language. They all read music (it is a requirement for participation in the Voice of Chicago), and they all have movement skills that enable them to finesse the many choreographed aspects of the choir’s performances.

The choir’s full concert schedule in Italy will include stops at the Teatro Alighieri in Ravenna, at the Chiesa di San Giacomo in the northern Italian city of Forli; at the Castello Rocchetta Mattei in Porretta, near Bologna; and at the Ravello Festival, one of the oldest and most renowned festivals in Italy, located in a town near the Amalfi Coast known as “The City of Music.”

In Ravenna, the mayor has arranged for the choir to interact with that city’s large immigrant population, even personally leading the singers, and the refugees housed by the government there, on a hike in San Benedetto in Alpe.

Founded as a single choir in 1956, with a mission “to connect voices across the city,” the several different programs of the Chicago Children’s Choir now serve 4,600 youth who represent all 57 of Chicago’s zip codes. And over the decades it has expanded the mission of its founder, Reverend Christopher Moore, who believed in “uniting youth from diverse backgrounds to become global citizens through music.” Beyond the Voice of Chicago touring ensemble, the programs now include in-school choirs at 80 city schools scattered throughout 10 neighborhoods (with students receiving in-classroom training), and the DiMension program, a unique ensemble for young men with changing or changed voices, including those in late elementary, middle and high school.

“When we go out on tour, especially now, with the country’s travel bans and the situation in Chicago, we think of ourselves as peacemakers — a bright light that represents the best ideals of this country,” said Lee, the child of Korean immigrants. “And of course the mission doesn’t work unless it comes with total artistic excellence.”

Note: Follow the choir’s travels on ccchoir.org/italy.