James Windell
Vox GR, a nationally recognized choral ensemble, will perform a Christmas concert at Peace Lutheran Church in South Haven on Sunday December 22, 2024.
Presented by the South Haven Performance Series, the free concert will bring together an award-winning choir with a jazz duo for what the Vox GR artistic director calls a “collage expe-rience.”
During an interview from his Duluth, Minnesota residence where he is Director of Choral Activities at the University of Minnesota Duluth , Christopher Mason, Artistic Director of Vox GR, explained what he meant by referring to the concert as a collage experience.
“I call it a collage concert because we are in a collaboration for this concert with a jazz duo, Edye and Mike Hyde,” Mason said. “The concert will be a back and forth between tradi-tional Christmas carols, classical choral music, modern jazz numbers, jazz arrangements of Christmas carols, and secular pop music. It will be a tapestry of different textures and repertoire with each song related to the next by harmony or text.”
Vox GR was formed by Mason and three friends in 2022. “A friend said he and two oth-er people were interested in starting a professional choir in the area and they asked me if that was something I’d be interested,” Mason said. “I said absolutely and the four of us got it together, recruited singers and found the music we wanted to perform.”
Now, Mason says this performance in South Haven will be the beginning of their third season. Vox GR is comprised of professional singers who all reside in the West Michigan area. “This year we were awarded two second place finishes in a competition called the American Prize,” Mason said. “One of the awards was for Choral Performance from Professional Choirs and the second was for the Performance of American Music.” The American Prize National Non-profit Competitions in the Performing Arts is the nation’s most comprehensive series of contests in the classical arts.
“We were really honored by that because so many choirs from around Michigan Compet-ed in this competition,” he said. “Getting second place in these two categories is a real honor.” Vox GR has been invited to perform at the Michigan Music Conference in January, 2025. This conference brings together choir directors from all over Michigan.
Founded in 2010 by South Haven resident Bob Copping, the South Haven Performance Series is an all-volunteer community-based organization dedicated to providing a rich mixture of professional music and the performing arts for residents and visitors of South Haven.
“The goal in starting the Performance Series,” Copping said recently, “was to make avail-able top quality, largely classical music in the South Haven Community.”
Copping added that the concert on December 22will be one in which, “The audience can expect a remarkable gift to the community when they listen to the Vox GR Choral Ensemble.”
The 4:00 p.m. concert will be presented at the Peace Lutheran Church, 06321 Blue Star Memorial Hwy, South Haven. Admission is free.
