NEW YORK — A long, choir-robed line of teenagers caught some attention on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan on Thursday afternoon, especially as they ascended the steps to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
These 120 Port Angeles High School students are singers on a tour of New York City.
Choir director Jolene Dalton Gailey sent an audition recording to St. Patrick’s, and her singers were accepted — and there they were, gazing up at the vaulted ceilings and stained glass.
“What time will they sing?” asked a passer-by.
“Four o’clock,” answered Gailey, who had brought her students in at 3:30 p.m. to give them time to center themselves.
Five ensembles sang: the Men’s Choir, Women’s Choir, the Symphonic Choir, the Bella Voce women’s group and the select Vocal Unlimited choir.
As they lifted their voices, the cathedral filled with pure sound.
From Mendelssohn’s “Lift Thine Eyes” to Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More” to a medley of three African songs, the performers held the eyes and ears of the visitors to St. Patrick’s: People from all over the world, and people who didn’t know they were going to be treated to such a concert.
Soloist Beth Ann Brackett and the Symphonic Choir offered an appropriate song early on: Robert Lowry’s hymn “How Can I Keep from Singing?”
Gailey calls her singers the Men’s Choir and Women’s Choir, not the boys’ and girls’, because, she has said, she holds them to a high standard of performance.
She also cautioned them to keep their long robes away from the banks of burning candles on both sides of the church.
And so they walked to the front St. Patrick’s altar with dignity, to sing in Latin, German, Spanish and English, in works including “O Magnum Mysterium,” (“O great mystery”), by Morten Lauridsen.
At the close of the performance, the singers took their bows and Gailey, beaming, introduced them to the audience that had gathered during the past hour.
Port Angeles is at the very top left corner of your U.S. map, she said.
“Come see us,” she quipped; “We’re beautiful.”
The Port Angeles teenagers arrived in New York City, along with some three dozen chaperones, Tuesday afternoon.
They went not to their hotel in Newark, N.J., but straight to Times Square, where they spent the rest of the day bathed in bright lights.
Wednesday morning they boarded three chartered buses to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, site of the trip’s first performance.
After that came lunch in Little Italy, exploring in Chinatown and a bus tour of the city, from Wall Street to the Juilliard School of Music to Strawberry Fields, the John Lennon memorial in Central Park.
Today the itinerary starts with a ferry ride out to the Statue of Liberty and a visit to the Ellis Island Museum, part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument and the place where, between 1892 and 1924, some 12 million immigrants first entered the United States.
This afternoon brings another performance. The Port Angeles High School Symphonic Choir is scheduled to sing at 2 p.m. at the National Sept. 11 Memorial, on the former site of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.
The memorial honoring 2,977 people killed on Sept. 11, 2001, has been open since September 2011, and allows groups from across the country to give 15-minute, unamplified performances upon acceptance of their applications.
Saturday, the choirs’ last full day here, will be filled with singing at St. Bartholomew’s, a Manhattan cathedral where the Heritage Festival choir competition will be held.
All five choirs will compete,in the event from 11 a.m. until 6:30 p.m.
Then comes a Circle Line dinner cruise around New York Harbor Saturday night and a 5:30 a.m. check-in Sunday for the flight home.
________
Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
