The choral music grapevine has exceedingly narrow roots. A couple of years ago, when Desert Chorale artistic director Joshua Habermann was doing due diligence, he discovered a composition that could work well with his singers. How did he know it would work? They had already sung on the recording.
Four familiar voices to the Santa Fe community — soprano Sarah Moyer, alto Kate Maroney, and basses Harrison Hintzsche and Enrico Lagasca — were part of the Benedict XVI Choir for the 2022 recording of Frank La Rocca’s Mass of the Americas on Capella Records. Now, a few years later, Habermann has programmed passages from Mass of the Americas — a composition that fuses Gregorian chants and Mexican folk melodies into a devotional Mass — into Songs of the Americas , which will kick off the Desert Chorale season on July 14. Songs of the Americas 4 p.
m. Sunday, July 14; 7:30 p.m.
July 27 and August 1 Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi 131 Cathedral Place $12-$114 505-988-2282; desertchorale.org “I’m excited about it,” Habermann says.
“It’s everything from historical cathedral music from South America — mission music way out in the jungles that was written and it’s a miracle that we have it — all the way through Mass of the Americas , a new piece written by a North American composer a couple years ago. It’s a nice variety, and it’s a lot of fun, rhythmic stuff.” Habermann says the program, which also includes several compositions written in the 17th.
