Chanticleer Vocal Ensemble

The multiple Grammy Award-winning Chanticleer choir — named after the clear-singing rooster in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales — heralds in the dawn of our 130th Concert Classics series with five centuries of vocal music, from classics to spirituals to jazz. One of the most prolific recording and touring ensembles in the world, the “orchestra of voices” holds an honored place within the American Classical Music Hall of Fame and Billboard magazine’s “Top 10 Best-Selling Classical Artists.” Its twelve members finally make their Princeton University Concerts debut with a program that invites us to reconsider the sounds all around us and to imagine what our planet might be like without them—reminding us that music both inhabits and transcends our humanity. The program incorporates two exciting new works: a piece written specially for the occasion by the group’s composer-in-residence Ayanna Woods, and a new arrangement of Princeton alumna Majel Connery’s (Class of 2001) song cycle The Rivers are our Brothers. “The goal,” Connery explains, “is to give nature a voice. I wanted to allow these vibrant things to speak on their own behalf.”