2025 – 2026 Season

Nepean Choir is looking forward to our new 2025/26 season, beginning September 9th, 7:30pm at Woodroffe United Church!

Our fall/winter semester will be spent preparing for our December 5th concert, O Night Divine. The music will focus our eyes upward working on repertoire about the night sky, like Esenvalds’ Stars, Gjeilo’s Northern Lights, and Narverud’s Lunar Lullaby, as well as nighttime carols like The Darkest Midnight in December, O Holy Night, and of course, Silent Night. We are delighted to be welcoming the marvellous Jennifer Loveless back to the pipe organ who will be playing a variety of selections, including Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar Organ Suite! We will also be featuring the spectacular deep space photography of Gabriel Dornier.

Nepean Choir will focus our spring semester on preparing two major works for our large-scale collaboration, Better is Peace, on May 22nd at the Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre with Castenchel Choir, Nepean High School Choir, Bell High School Choir, and The Ottawa Symphony Orchestra. We will once again be joined by bass Matthew Li and mezzo-soprano Gabrielle Comeau-Gort.

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw’s The Listeners is the first work on our program. Premiered in 2019, the work is inspired by an artifact of greeting: Carl Sagan’s  ‘Golden Record’ created to send out to the far reaches of space with the NASA Voyager probes of the 1970s and includes texts that range from Tennyson to Lucille Clifton.

The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace by Welsh composer Karl Jenkins was commissioned by the Royal Armouries to mark the transition from one millennium to another. It reflects on the passing of ‘the most war-torn and destructive century in human history’ and looks forward in hope to a more peaceful future.

The work is built around the traditional Catholic Mass and includes settings of the Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei and Benedictus. But what makes the work distinctive are the lyrics drawn from many parts of the world and from diverse religions and cultures such as the Psalms, Rudyard Kipling, Japanese poet Toge Sankichi, and the Mahabharata.

We look forward to having you join us!