Contra Costa Chorale

Contra Costa Chorale’s New Artistic Director

The Contra Costa Chorale is pleased to announce that a new Artistic Director has been hired for the upcoming year. Following the sudden death of Cindy Beitmen, a search launched in May resulted in a fine array of talented potential successors. Of these, the standout for all who participated in the search, including Chorale members who auditioned the top three candidates, was Dr. Brad Schultz, who is already hard at work finalizing the Fall 2024 concert program.

A native of Minnesota, Brad’s musical background includes vocal and instrumental performance and conducting, church and community music making, university teaching and public musicology. Brad is also the director of music at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Belvedere, where he is organist, choir director, and artistic director of the concert series.

Before arriving in the Bay Area, Brad served United Methodist, Unitarian Universalist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian congregations in Oregon, Iowa, Minnesota, Idaho, and Georgia. He holds a Ph.D. in Musicology and Performance Practice from the University of Oregon. His dissertation focuses on the keyboard works of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, a composer active in Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century, through lenses of embodied cognition, rhetoric, and organology (the study of musical instruments). He also holds an MM in Organ Performance from Emory University and a BA in Music from Luther College.

Brad teaches online music courses for the University of Oregon and previously served on the faculty of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. He performs most regularly as an organist, collaborative keyboardist and continuo player, and conductor, and enjoys making music with other musicians in the Bay Area.

We welcome Brad to the Contra Costa Chorale community and hope that this will be the beginning of an inspiring and musically rewarding relationship for all. We invite you to mark your calendars for Brad’s inaugural concert performances with the Chorale on December 6, 2024 at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley in Kensington and December 8 at Walnut Creek Presbyterian Church.

The fall program, titled “Viennese Influence(r)s,” will feature works by composers who lived, worked and breathed the inspirational air in Vienna, in tribute to one of the greatest musical cities as well as to former Artistic Director Cindy Beitmen, who herself spent several formative years working there. We hope to see you there!

Friday, December 6 at 7:30PM – Live performance and Livestream
Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley
1 Lawson Road, Kensington
For tickets (both live and livestream): https://ticketstripe.com/cocochorale

Sunday, December 8 at 5:00PM – Live performance
Walnut Creek Presbyterian Church
1801 Lacassie Avenue, Walnut Creek
For tickets (live performance only): https://ticketstripe.com/cocochorale

Contra Costa Chorale Announces Death of Artistic Director Cindy Beitmen

RICHMOND, California, April 17, 2024: It is with deep sadness that the Contra Costa Chorale announces the death of Artistic Director Cindy Beitmen on Monday, April 15, 2024, of colorectal cancer that had metastasized to her brain.

Born in eastern Pennsylvania on December 29, 1953, Cindy spent her entire life making music, from her B.S. in music education to her final days as the brilliant director of the 58-year-old Contra Costa Chorale. She spent a number of years focusing on early music, writing her Master’s thesis at the University of Washington on Hildegard von Bingen, and, once in the Bay Area, establishing Women’s Antique Vocal Ensemble. Her early music expertise led to a position teaching both vocal and instrumental early music classes at Mills College. While there, she assisted Mills students in reestablishing the Mills College Choir—her first effort at building a community choir, which invited not just students but also alumnae, Mills staff, and community members to participate. She spent almost 20 years teaching voice and leading a choir at St. Albert Priory in Oakland.

Cindy Beitmen’s dream was always to establish a community chorus, one where everyone was welcome and the community was as important as the singing—and where everyone understood that the singing enriched the community in ways that no other group activity can. In 2012, she heard about a small chorus that was seeking a director. It was a match made in choral heaven, and her first concert as director of the Contra Costa Chorale (Chorale), titled simply “Hallelujah,” was presented in the fall of that year.

From that time on, Cindy and the Chorale became a collaborative team, enlarging the group, improving vocal technique, and especially building the tight-knit community that it has become. Even through the pandemic lockdown, Cindy and the core of the Chorale stayed in touch and a year later began singing, albeit masked and distanced.

Today the Chorale has close to 80 members, all of whom presented a two-performance concert on May 11 and 12 that celebrated Cindy’s life and legacy. Dr. Edith Copley, a world-renowned choral director, was the guest conductor.

Additionally, “Seed,” a special choral work, that was commissioned two years ago by the Chorale board to celebrate Cindy’s tenure with the group, premiered at this concert, conducted by the composer, Joan Szymko, a universally known creator of exciting and challenging choral works.

While the Contra Costa Chorale grieves the loss of its “Fearless Leader,” Cindy would be the first to say that the show must go on.

For further information, please contact cocochorale@gmail.com, or call at 510-730-0202.

Tribute to Cindy by the Brothers of St Alberts

Make Our Garden Grow

Contra Costa Chorale Spring 2024 Concert

Over the years the Contra Costa Chorale has performed concerts highlighting choral music specific to minority representations. “Amazing Grace” followed the development of Black music from its origins in Africa, to the music of enslaved people, which ultimately led to jazz, blues, and gospel music. “Out of the Shadows” was a concert consisting totally of women composers from the medieval and Renaissance periods to the 21^stcentury.

Even though progress has been made in including underrepresented groups of composers, we must take the responsibility through our performances to do whatever is possible to have equal footing in programming with the white male composers who have dominated the world of Western Music.

Our Spring concert, “Make Our Garden Grow,” brought together music written by Blacks, women, Indigenous peoples, and the LGBTQ+ community to make our audiences aware of, not only the inequities in programming, but also the amazingly beautiful music that too often is not given the status it deserves, overtaken by the dominance of the traditional white male in Western Music.

The highlight of the concert was a commissioned piece by Joan Szymko, widely regarded as an outstanding composer of choral music in America today. Her piece, “Seed,” is based on a poem “Declaration” by Elsa Gidlow, best known for writing On a Grey Thread, the first volume of openly lesbian love poetry published in North America. We are honored that Ms. Szymko has taken on this commission in celebration of Cindy Beitmen’s 12th anniversary directing the Chorale, and we were very excited to present it for the first time at our spring concert.

This concert showcased guest artists Rev. Carolyn Anderson and the Gathering Desire Community Fellowship singing gospel presentations of the historical ‘Spirituals’ in addition to joining the Chorale in singing Let Everything That Hath Breath, a gospel piece by composer Jeffery Ames.

We celebrate the diversity of choral music, bringing together composers who may have been previously marginalized or overlooked. We also rejoice in this opportunity to make a place at our table for guest artists with a variety of perspectives, cultures, musical styles, gender expressions, and lived experiences historical and contemporary. We invite you to recognize with us that music becomes all–especially music that comes from with ourselves, sung by and for all of us.

Program

Fall 2023 Concert

HEADLINES FROM VIENNA, AUSTRIA!

Savvy reporters have uncovered the somewhat well-kept secret that Mozart only wrote about one half to two thirds of his famed Requiem before he died! Even though the entire work is attributed to our darling savant, Wolfgang, the last three movements were written by, shall we say, lesser composers, since he did not survive to finish it in its entirety.

On December 2nd and 3rd, the Contra Costa Chorale performed the newly published 2022 Bärenreiter edition of the Mozart “Requiem,” which was completed and edited by Michael Ostrzyga. Mozart died before the completion of the “Requiem,” and thus various composers, most outstanding of whom was Franz Süssmayr, one of Mozart’s students, finished about one third of the total “Requiem.” There has been much controversy over the years concerning Süssmayr’s completion and therefore since 1941 there have been 4 partial completions, and no less than 16 full completions from various composers.

What may set this edition apart is that Ostrzyga has done an enormous amount of historical research in considering valid possibilities for the last three movements for which Mozart left no sketches. As Ostrzyga states, “I do not see my edition as being a substitute for Süssmayr’s completion, but rather as an alternative as perhaps Mozart could have composed in 1791.” Although any of these 16 completions in the last 82 years may be valid in one way or another, Ostrzyga comes to his completion with much historical evidence to back up his musical decisions.

We presented Mozart’s “Requiem” from a fresh perspective that, nonetheless, is closely tied to the “Requiem” you have always known through the years as a masterpiece in choral literature.

Accompanying the singers were two pianists, Martin Morley (the Chorale’s regular accompanist) and Chun Mei Wilson, and a string chamber orchestra. The soloists were Rita Lilly, soprano; Gabriela Estephanie Solis, alto; Mitch Ashley, tenor; and Liam Daley, bass.

Mozart Requiem Concert Program

Would you like to hear us right now? Click on the audio files below to experience works from our past concerts:

Ain’ a that good news – arr. William Dawson