PORT ANGELES — New York City, said choir director Jolene Dalton Gailey, is a singer’s paradise.
Which is why, after 21 fundraisers, a series of audition recordings and the orchestration of buses, planes and ferries on both sides of the country, Gailey is taking her students there this spring-break week.
To sing in three cathedrals and at the 9/11 Memorial, the Port Angeles High School choirs will depart early Tuesday for the city that never sleeps.
“It’s going to be awesome. I’m really, really, really excited,” said Maizie Reidel, a 16-year-old member of Bella Voce, one of the ensembles making the six-day trip.
Bella Voce is a new choir, “17 motivated, lovely women,” said Gailey.
Along with this group, Port Angeles High’s Men’s Choir, Women’s Choir, Symphonic Choir and the select Vocal Unlimited ensemble are going.
That’s 120 teenagers taking chartered buses around the city together, not just to their own performances but also to two Broadway shows, “Aladdin” and “On the Town”; on a New York Harbor dinner cruise; and on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.
Gailey has planned it all, sending audition videos and applying for performances at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Wednesday morning, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown Manhattan on Thursday, the 9/11 Memorial plaza Friday and, finally, in the Heritage Festival competition at St. Bartholomew’s Cathedral on Saturday.
As for the music, “I absolutely love it,” Maizie said.
The Port Angeles singers’ repertoire includes “O Magnum Mysterium” (“O Great Mystery”) by Morten Lauridsen, a medley of African songs, Eric William Barnum’s “The Stars Stand up in the Air” and “A Red, Red Rose,” the shape-note piece “Idumea” and, at the 9/11 Memorial, Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More.”
Together with the Port Angeles Choir Boosters, the students have been conducting fundraisers since June. They have given concerts, hired themselves out for holiday parties and held “the required car washes,” Gailey said.
Each student needed $1,600 to cover travel, lodging, food and activities.
When a few came up short, the director put the word out.
When it comes to young people and the arts, “this community is so generous,” Gailey said.
“I’ve taught in three [cities], and I’ve never experienced a community like this.”
Just in the past few days, donors — with and without personal connections to the students — have written checks totaling about $3,000, she said.
The trip has chaperones, too: 42 parents and grandparents. They’re paying their own way so as not to add to the students’ costs.
Maizie, along with Vocal Unlimited singers Clare Wiswell, 18, and Beth Ann Brackett, 17, all picked out the thing they believe will be most thrilling of all.
Singing in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the three said, will be an acoustically amazing moment.
The neo-Gothic edifice, built between 1858 and 1879, takes up an entire city block at 51st Street from Madison Avenue to Fifth Avenue.
Making music there, Wiswell said, “could be life-changing, even.”
________
Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz, who will cover the groups’ performances in New York City, can normally be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
