Festival Chorus
Please mark your calendars for our annual holiday concert which will be Saturday, December 10 at 5:00 pm at First Congregational Church of Stockbridge. Our 55-voice chorus will be singing two Magnificats, one by Vaughan Williams featuring the wonderful mezzo soprano Laura Acosta-Jobin and women’s voices, and the other by Flor Peeters. Other anthems of the season include those of John Rutter, William Mathias, Herbert Howells, Zoltan Kodaly, and Charles Ives. We are very excited to announce that our guest organist will be Rev. Timothy Weisman, the new pastor at Zion Lutheran Church in Pittsfield. Tim earned a bachelor of music from the University of Evansville in Indiana, a master of music from Yale School of Music, and a master of divinity from Yale Divinity School.
Tracy Wilson, Stockbridge Festival Chorus Conductor
New Music Director
We are pleased to announce that Sarah Jobin will become our next Minster of Music at First Congregational. She will be taking over from our interim director, Vaughn Mauren, who is headed to Christ Church Episcopal in Bronxville, New York.
Maestra Jobin has conducted performances of Tosca, Der fliegende Holländer, Norma, and the world premiere of Appomattox (Glass) with San Francisco Opera, and recently led a production for SFO of Rachel Portman’s The Little Prince. She has also conducted Conrad Susa’s Transformations, The Bear, Dr. Heidegger’s Fountain of Youth, and Egon und Emilie with the San Francisco Opera Center. Recent credits include Carmen with Anchorage Opera, a live recording of John Musto’s Volpone at Wolf Trap Opera, Carmen, La bohème, Il barbiere di Siviglia, and Faust with Tacoma Opera, and Der fliegende Holländer with Arizona Opera. Her recording with Frederica von Stade of the world premiere River of Song by Chris Brubeck can be heard on Convergence on the Koch label. Mr. Brubeck wrote the piece for her and the Tassajara Symphony, an orchestra she directed for four years after its founding in 1998. In 2004, she had the honor of being the first woman to conduct mainstage subscription performances at San Francisco Opera.
Maestra Jobin attended Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges. The Solti Foundation acknowledged her with a Special Grant in 2006, and she was a Visiting Artist at Harvard in 2008. She has a black belt in judo, and was the 2006 national champion in Ju-no-kata. Since 2001, she has sung in the gospel choir at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco.