PROGRAM NOTES AVAILABLE ONLINE HERE
Young Women’s Chorus
Susan McMane, Artistic Director & conductor
The premier ensemble of YWCP, the Young Women’s Chorus, opens its season as a guest artist at Old First Concerts. Start your holiday season with an exquisite candle-lit concert that includes Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols performed in full with harpist Meredith Clark, as well as music by Hildegard von Bingen, Rachmaninoff, Busto, Randall Thompson and many contemporary settings of traditional carols.
The Young Women’s Chorus of San Francisco is the premier ensemble of the Young Women’s Choral Projects. The Chorus, conducted by Susan McMane is comprised of singers ages 12-18, and has been praised for its beauty of sound, stellar musicianship, and dynamic programming. Acclaimed in the American Record Guide for its “refined and beautifully controlled singing,” the Young Women’s Chorus has also won many competitive, national awards including the American Prize in Choral Performance; the Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence, the Dale Warland Singers Commission Award from Chorus America and American Composers Forum; and the ASCAP Adventurous Programming Award. Recent activities include a debut performance at Carnegie Hall in 2018, a concert tour to South Africa in 2019, the premiere of the opera Abraham in Flames in 2019, and performances with the London Philharmonia Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony. Performing repertoire from early music to contemporary selections, the Chorus annually performs a professional series of concerts in the Bay Area, and commissions new works by leading composers.