Sunday, December 4, 2022 2:00 PM
Hill Auditorium
Handel’s Messiah
$12-20 student tickets available
Handel composed his oratorio Messiah over the course of a single month in 1741, six months before its triumphant premiere at a new concert hall in Dublin. Nearly 300 years later, Handel’s Messiah fills Hill Auditorium with its ravishing beauty brought to life by friends and colleagues from the community. Music director Scott Hanoian conducts the UMS Choral Union and the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra in this annual holiday tradition.
Join host Doyle Armbrust for “The Society for Disobedient Listeners” — a special pre-performance talk, 6:30 pm in the lower lobby of Hill Auditorium. (Saturday only)
Please note that the Saturday performance will begin at 7:30 pm.
Thank You to Our Sponsors
PATRON SPONSOR
- Carl and Isabelle Brauer Endowment Fund
MEDIA PARTNERS
Contact Info
scottph@umich.edu
About Scott
Scott Hanoian is the Music Director and Conductor of the University Musical Society Choral Union where he conducts and prepares the Grammy Award-winning chorus in performances with the world’s finest orchestras and conductors. Choruses prepared by Mr. Hanoian have sung under the batons of Yannick Nézet-Seguin, Leonard Slatkin, Ivan Fischer, Dennis Russell Davies, and Osmo Vänskä.
Mr. Hanoian is active as a conductor, organist, lecturer, continuo artist, accompanist, choral adjudicator, and guest clinician. He is the Director of Music and Organist at Christ Church Grosse Pointe, where he directs the church’s four choirs and oversees the yearly concert series. Mr. Hanoian has served on the faculty of Wayne State University and Oakland University and was the artistic director and conductor of the Oakland Choral Society from 2013–2015.
As an organist and conductor, Mr. Hanoian has performed concerts throughout the US and has led choirs on trips to Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, France, and Spain. Most recently, Mr. Hanoian led the Christ Church Choirs during weeklong residencies at York Minster, Durham Cathedral, Salisbury Cathedral, Wells Cathedral, and Westminster Abbey.
Before moving to Grosse Pointe, Mr. Hanoian was the Assistant Organist and Assistant Director of Music at Washington National Cathedral where he played the organ for many services including the funerals for Presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford.
Mr. Hanoian has recorded the complete organ works of Johannes Brahms for the JAV label.
Sherezade Panthaki, soprano, enjoys ongoing international collaborations with conductors Nicholas McGegan, Masaaki Suzuki, Mark Morris and more. Recent engagements include early music and oratorio performances with the New York Philharmonic, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Bach Collegium Japan, Wiener Akademie (Austria), NDR Hannover Radiophilharmonie (Germany), the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Boston Early Music Festival, and the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra (Canada).
Born and raised in India, Ms. Panthaki holds graduate degrees from the Yale School of Music and the University of Illinois. She is a founding member of the Kaleidoscope Vocal Ensemble, celebrating racial and ethnic diversity in performances and educational programs of early and new music. Ms. Panthaki is a renown clinician, has taught voice at Yale University, and currently heads the Vocal program at Mount Holyoke College.
Countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen brings his “astonishingly beautiful,” “golden toned” (The Guardian) instrument to a broad range of repertoire spanning the Baroque to the contemporary. Acclaimed as both a “young star” and “complete artist” by the New York Times and as “extravagantly gifted… poised to redefine what’s possible for singers of this distinctive voice type” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Mr. Nussbaum Cohen’s passion for creating performances of great vocal beauty and dramatic intensity have earned him a reputation as “a redefining force in the countertenor field” (Limelight).
Mr. Nussbaum Cohen finds a close affinity between the ancient musical traditions of his Jewish heritage and the Baroque works composing much of his operatic repertoire. Equally invigorated performing new works, Nussbaum Cohen’s first commercial recording project – the world premiere of Kenneth Fuchs’ Poems of Life performed with the London Symphony Orchestra under JoAnn Falletta – was honored with a GRAMMY® Award for Best Classical Compendium in 2019; and his interpretation of the Refugee’s aria from Jonathan Dove’s Flight provided the centerpiece for his extensive catalogue of competition successes, including winning the Grand Prize at the 2017 Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition, top prizes in Houston Grand Opera’s Eleanor McCollum Competition and the Dallas Opera Guild Competition, a George and Nora London Foundation Award, the Richard Tucker Study Grant and Career Grant, and in 2024, top prize in the Gerda Lissner Foundation’s International Vocal Competition.
The career of exuberant young Finnish-American tenor Miles Mykkanen was launched with a national win of the Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition in 2019. He has since impressed with a series of important debuts on the world’s major stages, including the Metropolitan Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Canadian Opera Company, and Royal Opera House Covent Garden, where The i declared his performance “the most beautiful singing of the evening” and Opera Magazine dubbed it “so striking and brilliant” that “he managed to turn the Steersman into a principal character.”
Mykkanen has quickly become the go-to tenor for roles requiring a deft balance of power, lyricism, and dramatic acuity, including a new Barrie Kosky production of Die Fledermaus and Philip Venables’ world premiere We Are The Lucky Ones, both at Dutch National Opera, a new Ted Huffman production of L’incoronazione di Poppea at Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, and the North American premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence at San Francisco Opera.
A proud Yooper from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Mykkanen leveraged his pandemic downtime to create community around the arts in his hometown of Ironwood. As founding Artistic Director of the Emberlight Festival, he has built a formidable board, raising $750,000 in a county where the annual median income is $29,000. Emberlight has now produced 119 individual events – including a film festival with entries from 83 countries, live performances of chamber music, cabarets, and plays, a photography show and public art installations, and performance infusions featuring regional artists in everything from Ojibwe basket weaving to wool waulking. More than 70% of those events have been free to attend, ensuring that the arts are accessible to everyone in the rural region.
Filipino-American bass-baritone Enrico Lagasca is an in-demand vocalist – having performed more than a hundred oratorios, new-music works, opera roles, song cycles, and collections. His “smooth, dark bass voice” can be heard on six Grammy Award-nominated recordings.
Amid the wide-ranging demands of his repertoire, critics note Enrico’s larger-than-life presence. “Bass-baritone Enrico Lagasca summoned nearly as much volume as everyone else onstage put together.” Storytelling is at the center of his artistry. He has been described as having “an oratorio voice that strikes fear of God in the hearts of the audience.” His performance of St. Matthew’s Passion at Saint Thomas’s Church was described as “an outpouring of devotion and grief as elegant as it was moving.”
Soloist highlights of recent seasons include Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass with Voices of Ascension in New York, Handel’s Messiah at Ann Arbor’s University Musical Society and at Carnegie Hall with Musica Sacra, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio at Washington Bach Consort, and Mendelssohn’s Walpurgisnacht with the St. Louis Symphony. Enrico has collaborated with conductors such as Riccardo Muti, Zubin Mehta, Pablo Heras-Casado, Nicholas McGegan, Jane Glover, John Butt, John Nelson, Matthew Halls and Carl St. Clair.
Enrico’s passion extends beyond performing. He is dedicated to advocacy for the Queer community and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. As a member of the Kaleidoscope Vocal Ensemble, a musical group committed to diversity and social justice, he participates in creative outreach programming for various communities with limited access to the arts. His performances of Craig Hella Johnson’s Considering Matthew Shepard reflect Enrico’s dedication to works that address the LGBTQ+ community.
Doyle Armbrust is a Chicago-based violist and co-founder of the three-times Grammy-nominated Spektral Quartet. His writing has infiltrated program books at the Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestras as well as publications including Crain’s Chicago Business, Chicago Magazine, Time Out Chicago, and The Chicago Tribune.
In UMS’s 2022/23 season, Doyle hosts “The Society of Disobedient Listeners” — an interactive pre-concert experience reconnecting listeners to the subversive, visceral, and even revolutionary elements of the evening’s program. Conceived as an anti-lecture, “Disobedient Listeners” draws the great music of the past into proximity with the felicities and calamities of modern life.
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