Spring is a busy time for the Bethel College Concert Choir, especially this year.
The choir started their spring performance season at the Kansas Music Educators Association (KMEA) annual convention with a concert Feb. 28 in the Mary Jane Teall Theater at Century II in Wichita.
The annual Spring Tour Send-Off Concert is March 9 at 4 p.m. in Memorial Hall on the Bethel campus.
Dr. Henry S. Waters, director of choral music at Bethel, directs the Concert Choir.
The choir earned their KMEA spot via blind audition last spring, and prepared a 25-minute memorized program for KMEA 2025.
On March 9, the preview concert includes the full choir as well as selections by smaller groups made up of Concert Choir members: Chamber Singers (soprano/alto/tenor/bass), Woven (SA) and Open Road (TB).
The preview concert is free and open to the public, with a freewill offering taken to help with tour expenses.
This year’s spring break tour will take the singers to several venues in Kansas, Minnesota, South Dakota and Nebraska, March 14-19.
The tour theme is “Unity & Hope.”
Pieces range from an 18th-century text by Charles Wesley, “Hallelujah!”, and an arrangement of the Negro spiritual “Swing low, sweet chariot”; to selections from a cantata by Craig Hella Johnson, Considering Matthew Shepard, and an extended work by Kyle Pederson, An Unfolding Vision, that recently premiered at Carnegie Hall; to work by contemporary composers and arrangers such as Jake Runestad, Sarah Quartel and Shawn Kirchner.
Waters directs the Chamber Singers and another smaller ensemble comprising treble voices, the Chapel Choir, along with the Concert Choir, and advises the student-directed a cappella ensembles Woven and Open Road.
This year’s spring tour starts at Rainbow Mennonite Church in Kansas City, Kan., on March 14 before moving to the Minneapolis/St. Paul area for concerts at Faith Mennonite Church during morning worship on March 15 and Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church that evening.
March 18 will feature “lunch with the choir” at the Mountain Lake (Minn.) Golf Course, and then an evening concert at Salem Mennonite Church, Freeman, S.D.
March 19 is the final event of the tour, an evening concert at Bethesda Mennonite Church, Henderson, Neb.
Bethel is a four-year liberal arts college founded in 1887 and is the oldest Mennonite college in North America. Bethel was the first Kansas college or university to be named a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Center, in 2021. For more information, see https://www.bethelks.edu
