Even if you have wonderful performance spaces at home, being able to create music in different places is a uniquely powerful experience. It helps connect with the music, and the greater world around you, in a new deeper way. Whether you’re performing in a world-famous hall, or at a competitive festival, or in a small church venue with an especially warm and friendly audience, concerts are the centerpiece of a tour. Here are some examples of noteworthy performances on recent tours.
The University Singers from California State University, Fullerton, conducted by Rob Istad, were on tour in South Africa and Rwanda in July, 2024. The concerts in South Africa were as powerful, inspiring and tear-inducing as concerts there always are and, as normal, they took place in concert halls, on stages, with the audience generally sitting in seats.
Things were different in Rwanda.
Their first performance was planned as an informal exchange with the choir at the Gisimba Memorial Center, a wonderful after-school program that supports the residents of Kigali who need help during difficult times. The event started politely enough, but after each choir had sung its couple of pieces, and everyone had joined together in a joint piece, structure was replaced by spontaneity, and as the two conductors looked on redundantly from the sides, the choirs joined together in countless songs (almost none of which had been heard before in a University Singers performance) that they found they had in common.
Next was the opening concert of the Ubumuntu (loosely, ‘Being Human’) Arts Festival, held in an amphitheater at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, where over 250,000 victims are buried in mass graves. The festival, however, looks forward more than back, and the concert was a startlingly eclectic mixture of myriad types of performing arts, all bound together by enthusiasm and optimism that were carried around the world on a live Facebook stream.
Then, in the small northern village of Sunzu, perched between two lakes at 7,000 feet, an old basketball court was the setting. The University Singers and the local school children sang to each other, surrounded by great natural beauty, in a sublime moment that challenged many performance preconceptions…
Finally, in a multi-purpose church hall in Musanze that was overflowing with hundreds of local singers, the most ‘it’s not like this in Fullerton’ moment occurred. Rob was conducting his choir in ‘Jerusalema’, well known and loved throughout Africa, and the listeners just had to get to their feet and dance. Watching Rob’s singers’ expressions as a solid phalanx of dancers swept down the center aisle, at the end of which Rob was obliviously conducting, finally engulfing him and forming a dance troupe between him and his choir, was a moment for musical history.
The Golden State Youth Orchestra is no stranger to performing in prestigious festivals and halls like Barcelona’s Palau de la Música Catalana on their recent tour of France and Spain.
Even very active church choirs, like Myers Park United Methodist Church Chancel Choir, relish the opportunities tours give them beyond their regular routine. While in Munich on their most recent tour, they thoroughly enjoyed spending time with the Evangelische Kantorei Moosburg in rehearsal, sharing a joint concert in the Evangelische Versohnungskirche, and celebrating with dinner together afterwards.
There’s also the University of Oregon Chamber Singers, who enjoy competing among the best choirs globally with appearances at events like the World Choir Games. It’s all the more exciting when they win first place in their categories, with the highest score of the entire competition, as they did in Auckland in 2024!
Or maybe you’d like to seek out unique places on tour — like the Siskiyou Singers who rode a cable car to their venue in the mountains, as part of the Alta Pusteria International Choir Festival in Italy.