It was standing room only inside of the Yelm High School Performing Arts Center (PAC) during the evening hours of Wednesday, March 12, as the YHS choir previewed several of its movements in the program’s Carnegie Hall performance in May.
Weeks after the Yelm High School Choir Boosters Committee and Yelm community members raised $4,500 for YHS choir program’s upcoming trip to New York for a Carnegie Hall performance, community members were able to get a sneak preview of what’s to come in the Big Apple.
YHS choir members performed two of the seven movements it will sing inside Carnegie Hall in early May alongside the Philadelphia Philharmonic Orchestra, the University of Central Arkansas, the University of Nebraska Kearney, the University of Guadalajara, a high school out of Colorado and a professional choir from Mexico City.
Though the performance just included the YHS choir and a piano, YHS Choir Director Tim Henderson said in an interview with the Nisqually Valley News in February that the concert gave community members a good snippet of what they’ll be performing in May in New York.
“The students are knee deep in learning the music,” Henderson said in February. “There’s seven movements of the work called Xantolo. It’s a requiem mass based on the Day of the Dead. There’s very much Spanish flair throughout all the music. With Dia de los Muertos, it’s a party. You’re celebrating life. So you do have moments of sorrowfulness within the music, but then the rest of it is a celebration. We’re singing in four different languages. Spanish, that one’s easy. Latin, that one’s easy. But Nahuatl, native to the region of Mexico before the Spanish came, and Tének, which is also native — I had to learn all of these different sounds that we don’t hear anymore. The work I had to do to learn how to teach this has been crazy, but it will be very rewarding in the end.”
