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 Entertainment | June 2005 
U.S. Choir Group To Tour
 Theresa Braine - The Herald Mexico
| | Venues include the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City. |
One of the most moving ways to connect with another culture is through music, and that is just what the New York City choir the Davidson Singers is aiming to do with a visit to Mexico City, State of Mexico and San Miguel de Allende during the first week of July. Venues include the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City, where they will give a concert Friday, July 2, at 7 p.m.
The trip is the brainchild of Denise Sariego, a New Yorker, and a member of the singing group who is also married to a Mexican. She has been coming to Mexico since the 1970s. For years she has wanted to share the Mexico she knows with her singing friends.
Sariego had the contacts her husband's extended family, to begin with and started planning last September while on sabbatical from her job teaching college reading in New York. "Through them (her in-laws) I got most of the gigs," Sariego said in a recent interview with The Herald Mexico.
Another singer, Therese McCormick, was acquainted with an organist at the Metropolitan Cathedral, Rocina Vrionides de Gómez (also president of the Mexican Association of Organists), who worked with famed Mexican organ maestro Manuel Zacarías to get the Davidson Singers into the country's treasured 16th century cathedral located on the north side of the Zócalo. Among other songs, the group, which is headed by and named after veteran U.S. musician Virginia Davidson, will perform music from the cathedral's repertoire.
"[Zacarías] gave me music from the cathedral and said we could sing any of it that we wanted," said Sariego. "Virginia picked out three small pieces that we put together as a section, and they're beautiful."
Visiting Tepotzotlán, State of Mexico, last year, Sariego saw for the first time the church where the group will sing Saturday, July 3. Captivated by the baroque exterior of the Church of San Francisco Javier, she went inside and asked about having the group sing there. Sariego met with church choir leaders, later sent a CD of the groups' performances, and the church "wrote me back and officially invited us," says Sariego. They will sing a mix of secular and sacred music written by Mexican, Spanish and U.S. composers.
In the State of Mexico they will also perform for high school students at the Escuela Mano Amiga Cualcán, in a part of the Lerma community that was founded by Spanish opera singer Plácido Domingo, who gave funds to relocate people left homeless in the city's devastating 1985 earthquake. In return, some students' parents who are members of a pre-Hispanic dance group will perform for the singers.
From there the Davidson Singers will head to Metepec and Toluca. In Metepec they will sing with Coral Mexiquense, the 26-member Mexican chorus' first international singing experience.
Together they will do a traditional American ballad, "Blow the Candles Out," and a version of "La Bamba" arranged by the Mexican composer Ramón Noble, García said.
The group will sing in the Church of Saint John the Baptist and the Metepec Cultural Center before heading to San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, where they'll be singing from July 8 through 10.
There they will sing in Saint Paul's Episcopal Church in an ecumenical service that will mark the first time the Anglican and Catholic Bishops have celebrated mass together in San Miguel.
Theresa Braine is a freelance reporter based in Mexico. |
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