"Harmonies of Hope" Really Struck a Chord

By Christina Sunstone, Alto, Magnolia Chorale

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Walking back to the green room at the Magnolia Chorale Spring concert intermission, I was still buzzing with the energy and emotion of the first four movements of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Dona Nobis Pacem. The music is so passionate, and so challenging—both to perform and to hear.

We’d been preparing for months: watching YouTube videos of other choirs like they were training montages; obsessively playing the cantata in our cars; holding sectional rehearsals where we tried (and sometimes failed) together to nail those tricky passages. And now, the night of our first concert, I felt both gratitude and joy to be singing and so deeply experiencing this moving and beautiful piece. “I love singing in a choir!” I blurted to the baritone walking beside me. “I might have gone my whole life not knowing about this piece if we weren’t singing it.” He smiled, and nodded in agreement.

“A special highlight was having Beckett van Dyck—a talented 11th-grader(!) from Seattle’s Ingraham High School—playing the bass organ line alongside our intrepid collaborative pianist, Zhanhong Kuang, who was playing the organ’s treble line. It’s not just the afterglow from the performance that makes me say this: they sounded amazing.

My neighbor came to hear us sing. It was his first time attending a live choral performance. He was intrigued by the two opening pieces: both sung in foreign languages, both performed by smaller ensembles from within the choir. He’d thought that Dona Nobis Pacem might remind him of the opera recordings his father played when he was a child, but instead it was something entirely new for him, unlike any classical music he’d experienced. And he loved our closing piece, United in Purpose, a gospel arrangement by Rollo Dilworth of a poem by Maya Angelou. A week later he was still talking about the wide variety of music we performed, and how it surprised and pleased him.
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With the concert behind us, we’ll gather later this month for an all-choir picnic, a chance to unwind and connect beyond the rehearsal space. Any singing that happens will be spontaneous rather than rehearsed—and that’s just fine by me.
If you’d like to sing with us next fall, consider joining the Chorale! We resume our practices on Sunday, September 7, 2025. Check our home page during the summer for more updates. 

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