Collaborative concert strikes chord with pros, amateurs

By Nancy Wick
University Week

The Northwest Chamber Chorus performs. Jean Feagin is at right in the foreground. Otis Pease is wearing glasses in the rear.

Two choruses - one from the University and one from the community - will team up tonight to present Grand and Glorious: A Night of Great Opera Choruses. The concert, which includes music by Verdi, Beethoven, Wagner and others, is at 7:30 p.m. in Meany Theatre.

One of the groups, the UW Chamber Singers, is part of the University’s School of Music. It’s directed by Music Professor Geoffrey Boers and is made up of students. The other, the Northwest Chamber Chorus, is a nonprofit community organization made up of nonprofessional, unpaid singers. But the community group is not without its UW ties. To begin with, its director, Steven Demorest, is also a faculty member in the School of Music. And many of its members work at the UW - in totally unmusical jobs.

Take Jean Feagin, for example. By day she’s an associate professor of pathobiology and a senior scientist at Seattle Biomedical Research Institute. But since 1985 she’s also gone to weekly rehearsals faithfully in order to be part of the chorus. “I’ve been singing almost without a break since I was in the fourth grade,” says Feagin. “There’s a part of me that just comes alive when all the voice parts combine and we make a beautiful sound.”

Feagin says she toyed with minoring in music when she was in college but couldn’t fit it in with her intense science courses. She has no regrets. She says she loves her work, but in a way it’s because she does, that music remains an important part of her life. “Like many academics I’m very caught up in my work; it doesn’t stop when I go home,” Feagin says. “But when I sing, that’s all I do. I don’t think about anything else.”

Miriam Espeseth, like Feagin, works in the health sciences, but also like her, has been singing for most of her life. She’s an editor of research publications in pediatrics who has been with the chorus since 1982.

“I come from a musical family and I sang in groups all the way through college,” Espeseth says. “Then I didn’t sing for a while and I missed it terribly.” That’s when she auditioned and became part of the group she says is “like a family. It’s a very important part of my life.”

The chorus has been an important part of many people’s lives, boasting a number of members with tenures at least as long as Espeseth’s and Feagin’s. In fact, it has two members who were there for its founding more than 30 years ago. And one of those two is another UW member, History Professor Emeritus Otis Pease.

“I’ve been doing choral singing all my life, ever since I was a boy soprano at age 10,” Pease says. “I’m just very turned on to music.”

Pease has been more than a chorus member. He’s sung in a sub-group that earned money for the chorus and has been a fund-raiser in other ways. He’s also the group’s informal historian, having written a lengthy chronicle of the group’s milestones that appears on its Web site: http://www.scn.org/northwestchamberchorus. And he’s married to another chorus member who’s a UW employee, Donna McCampbell, senior computer specialist and database administrator for the School of Medicine.

“I officially retired from the chorus three years ago,” Pease says. “But then they announced a summer tour in Europe and I couldn’t resist. I came back.”

Pease is enthusiastic about tonight’s concert, which he says is a rare collaboration with a UW group. But it’s the music itself that really excites him. “This is a whole new kind of music for us with a different set of techniques,” he says. “In a chorus, most of what you do is beautifully subtle. But opera uses the 19th century techniques of exaggeration and heightened emotionalism. It’s a really big sound.”

The big sound made possible by combining two 40-voice groups made opera a natural choice for the concert, says Demorest, the group’s director. “We wanted something that would show off the majesty of the mass choir.”

But, he adds, the music is beautiful as well as big. “This is some of the most memorable music from opera,” he says, reeling off some of the famous pieces to be performed: Verdi’s Va pensiero, Rossini’s Passeggiata and the finale from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Gondoliers.

Some of the pieces will be sung by the individual choruses and some will make use of the full, 80-voice group. Demorest and the other director, Boers, have directed each other’s groups for rehearsals, but they didn’t bring the groups together until dress rehearsal. That was no problem, Demorest says, because his nonprofessional group is as well trained musically as the University group.

“This group has a commitment to singing quality music and they don’t just want to sing it - they want to sing it well,” he says. “That’s very exciting for me as a conductor - to work with a group of people who are there because they want to be and are willing to put in a lot of time and effort.”

Tickets for the concert are $15 ($10 for students and seniors) and are available at the Arts Ticket Office and at the door. A portion of the proceeds will benefit the UW Opera Program.