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The Peninsula Women’s Chorus’ holiday concert is focused on the theme of hope. The chorus will perform the concert Dec. 13 at First United Methodist Church in Palo Alto and Dec. 14 at Mission Santa Clara.
Martin Luther King Jr. famously said: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
Hinged on this very sentiment, the Peninsula Women’s Chorus (PWC) will present a holiday concert this weekend at two venues, in Palo Alto and Santa Clara. The theme of the program is “Cultivating Hope,” which syncs well with these polarizing times.
Dr. Anne K. Hege, artistic director of PWC, chose the music for this concert back in June in a bid to fuel a sense of “hopefulness, optimism and possibility,” especially in preparation for the then-upcoming election.
“It was already clear it was going to be a very stressful election process,” she said. “In all honesty, I did not expect the political spectrum to go the way it did.”
The election result makes the theme all the more relevant, said Hege, who refers to the selected songs and texts as “ear worms” for the singers’ minds.
“I think of the repertoire I choose as a gift to the singers; these are the pieces they’re going to live with for four months (of rehearsal),” she said. “I thought I would love to give them this idea of hope as a muscle, the idea that we have some agency in building our own accessibility to hope.”
The program comprises 16 pieces in total. In addition to holiday music that celebrates Christmas and Kwanzaa, PWC classics like the vocal arrangement of Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” from “Song of Survival,” and contemporary songs like “Ain’t I A Woman?” by Eric Tuan and “Before I Forget” by Amy X Neuburg, the choir will premiere two contrasting treble arrangements — “Os Justi” by Anton Bruckner and “Meet Me for Noche Buena” by Saunder Choi.
“It’s a love letter to fellow Filipino Americans,” said Choi, about his piece, which is about the holiday Noche Buena, celebrated in the Philippines, and features poetry by Aileen Cassinetto, San Mateo’s first Filipino poet laureate. He first composed this piece for Pacific Chorale two years ago. “It’s neither American, nor is it really, purely Filipino — it’s a Filipino-American experience.”
Choi and Hege met around a year ago at Chorus America, where she came across his piece. “It is celebrating a tradition, it is also something that’s quite upbeat,” Hege said of the Los Angeles-based composer and choral artist’s six-minute-long song. “It hit this perfect spot.”
Choi’s music in general tends to explore themes such as identity, representation, racial justice, LGBTQ+ advocacy, climate justice and immigration.
For him, many of these themes are close to home. It has been 12 years since he moved to the United States from the Philippines.
“The journey of my works has started to lead toward more and more exploring the idea of syncretism — the amalgamation of different cultures and religions,” said Choi, who is Filipino-Chinese and identifies as gay. The assimilative experience of being an immigrant in this country is often reflected in his work.
During her repertoire selection process, Hege was mindful about ensuring the program included different “voices,” both in terms of identity and style, and of the kind expressed in both overt and subtle ways. “The concert that I would like to curate is one that shows diversity through the programming,” Hege said.
The idea of approaching music as advocacy is especially appealing in a world where equity is challenged every day, the musicians noted.
“Sometimes it’s very difficult to choose joy in times like these,” said Choi, who describes this concert as a possibility to look beyond the binary boxes we tend to categorize people in. He hopes the program will encourage the audience to spot more nuance in the stories around them. “A political figure like Donald Trump is more of a symptom of a system that’s not working, rather than the cause of it.”
Choi loves that his first name “Saunder” is a homonym for the English word “sonder,” which describes the realization that other people have lives just as nuanced and as complex as one’s own. “That kind of nuance is what I want to promote in what I say and what I do,” he said.
“Cultivating Hope” by The Peninsula Women’s Chorus takes place Dec. 13, 7 p.m., at First United Methodist Church, 625 Hamilton Ave., Palo Alto and Dec. 14, 2 p.m., at Mission Santa Clara, 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara (a pre-concert talk with Choi takes place Dec. 13 at 6:30 p.m. and a talk with Choi and Cassinetto takes place Dec. 14 at 1:30 p.m.) Tickets are $10-$40. For more information visit pwchorus.org.
