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.
Soprano Sherezade Panthaki’s international success in music of the Baroque and beyond has been fueled by superbly honed musicianship; “astonishing coloratura with radiant top notes” (Calgary Herald); “a full, luxuriously toned upper range” (Los Angeles Times), and passionately informed interpretations, “mining deep emotion from the subtle shaping of the lines” (The New York Times). An acknowledged star in the early-music field, Ms. Panthaki enjoys ongoing collaborations with many of the world’s leading interpreters including Nicholas McGegan, Masaaki Suzuki, Mark Morris, Nicholas Kraemer, Matthew Halls, Paul Agnew, and Lawrence Cummings.
Acclaimed as a “young star” and “complete artist” by the New York Times and “extravagantly gifted… poised to redefine what’s possible for singers of this distinctive voice type” by the San Francisco Chronicle, American countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen is one of the classical vocal world’s most promising rising stars.
He has been awarded by many major competitions, including the Grand Prize of the 2017 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and a 2017 Sara Tucker Study Grant and 2022 Richard Tucker Career Grant from the Richard Tucker Music Foundation. His first commercial recording project – the world premiere recording of Kenneth Fuchs’ Poems of Life with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by JoAnn Falletta – was honored with a 2019 GRAMMY® Award in the Best Classical Compendium category, which recognizes albums with multiple soloists and multiple works.
Miles Mykkanen has garnered recognition on the world’s concert and operatic stages for his “focused, full-voiced tenor” (The New York Times). Of his performance in the title role of Candide at Tanglewood, it was reported in Opera, “Mykkanen sang and spoke feelingly and superbly, with crystalline diction, a powerful lyric sound seemingly capable of infinite dynamic gradations.”
Filipino-American bass-baritone Enrico Lagasca performs oratorio, opera, chamber music, and recitals with repertoire from early to contemporary music both as soloist and chorister across the United States and internationally.
“Enrico Lagasca’s bold bass-baritone impressed with unusual brilliance and power even in his lowest register” (San Diego Story). Mr. Lagasca is a seasoned performer of chamber music and performs as soloist and chorister with some of the country’s most reputable and distinguished groups such as the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, Choir of St. Ignatius Loyola, Bach Choir of Holy Trinity Lutheran, St. Thomas Choir of Men and Boys, Musica Sacra, Cathedral Choir of St. John the Divine, Bard Festival Chorus, New York Choral Artists, TENET Vocal Artists, Clarion Music Society, The Metropolitan Opera Chorus, Washington Bach Consort, Santa Fe Desert Chorale, Conspirare, Skylark Vocal Ensemble, Kaleidoscope Vocal Ensemble, Bach Collegium San Diego, Spire Vocal Ensemble, The Thirteen, and Seraphic Fire.
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.