The Whitehorse Community Choir director and conductor, Barbara Chamberlin, will lead the singing ensembles for the last time this May.
Barbara Chamberlin is looking forward to moving on to new endeavours. Her upcoming retirement from the Whitehorse Community Choir (WCC), where she’s served as choral director and conductor since 2005, is bittersweet, but it’s been a packed final season for her and she’s making sure she goes out on a high note.
“It’s all bittersweet,” Chamberlain said. “I know I’ll be crying. It’s been a great nineteen years with lots of different things happening, lots of learning for me and lots of making friends, and to know I won’t be doing it anymore is very sad for me; but on the other hand, it’s time to say goodbye, so to speak.”
With three concert runs this season—one being the “Believe in the Sun” showcase featuring the Chamber Choir and the Persephones, in early March; one being the WCC annual springtime performances, May 3 and 4; and the last being a joint concert with Edmonton choir Te Deum, which will take place May 24 and 25—Chamberlain has been even busier than usual with show preparations.
“This is to make up for what was cancelled when COVID hit,” Chamberlin said of the joint concert with Te Deum. “We were supposed to go with them and another choir from Abbotsford, B.C., to see Carnegie Hall in New York, and it got cancelled pretty much the week before people were supposed to leave. It really sucked.”
Te Deum had fundraised money for the trip and, after sitting on it for four years, decided to spend it coming up to Whitehorse to sing with the WCC in a show mainly focused on Mozart’s Vespers at the Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre.
As for the annual springtime show, with this being Chamberlin’s last one, she decided to make a set of some of her own favourite pieces to bow out with.
“It’s called ‘My Favourite Songs’ because over the years there have just been some that I’ve really, really liked,” Chamberlin explained. “They have to be balanced by the difficulty level and the style and everything, so i don’t know that they’re my absolute favourites but maybe I couldn’t do all my favourites.”
Two of the selections are Chamberlin’s own pieces she’s arranged. She figured this might be her last chance to do some of these pieces with a choir this size, so she seized the opportunity.
“I always try to do original music,” she said. “So that’s pretty cool.”
Many of the songs will be brought back from previous WCC concert editions, making up a sort of greatest-hits setlist of tunes that Chamberlin and her singers have enjoyed working on over the years, from shows ranging in theme from African music to songs of the 1960s.
“We’ll have strings for both of these concerts, as well,” Chamberlin said.
When Chamberlin was growing up, her father was also a choir director, and she never understood then why he was under so much stress all the time until she spent some years doing it herself. She looks forward to seeing the choir continue to prosper under new leadership and is excited to undertake new creative endeavours of her own, including continuing to make her own music.
“I need to move on and do other things,” she said with a laugh. “I’m getting older and I don’t need to be quite so stressed all the time.”
With Chamberlin moving on, the Whitehorse Community Choir is now in search of a new choral director to join Chamber Choir leader C.D. Saint, who is helming the various vocal ensembles. To keep up-to-date on information about the upcoming shows and to read more about the quest for a new choral director, visit whitehorsechoir.org.
