Peninsula Singers Celebrate 35 Years

The Peninsula Singers have been making choral music in Door County for thirty-five years. To celebrate the group’s history, Artistic Director Merle Colburn chose music for this spring’s concerts representative of its formative years. The concerts will open with “The Star Spangled Banner” as arranged by Grant Colburn. Other numbers from prior concerts include two choruses from Mozart’s “Requiem”; “He Watching Over Israel” from Mendelssohn’s Elijah; “In Paradisum” from Gabriel Faure’s Requiem, and “The Last Words of David” by Randall Thompson.

Director Colburn went on to say, “One of the numbers featured will be Trilogy. This number was the combined effort of Barbara Larson, poet and spouse of former director George Larson, and Don Richter, composer and my predecessor as artistic director. The work is a tribute to Door County.”

Director Colburn invites former chorus members in the audience to join in singing the “Hallelujah Chorus” from G. F. Handel’s Messiah (from the first concert presented by The Peninsula Singers, under founding director Mel Kasen), after which the rousing “Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Peter Wilhousky will conclude the concert.

The thirty-fifth anniversary spring concerts will be presented at 7 pm on May 10 at the Sturgeon Bay United Methodist Church and at 3 pm on May 11 at the Door Community Auditorium in Fish Creek.