A Powell River men’s choir will soon be off for a musical tour of Yucatan in Mexico.
Chor Musica, a Powell River Academy of Music choir, has four concerts lined up, all of which are being promoted by the Cultural Branch of the Yucatan.
“The Yucatan government has been very encouraging,” said Mike Heron, a choir member who has organized the trip. “It has produced a banner for us and is planning on having a couple of receptions for the choir.”
The group will be staying in Mérida, the capital of Yucatan, and branching out from there. The choir will be performing at the San Juan de Padua Convent in Izamal, at Ex Telar La Aurora in Valladolid, at the Daniel Ayala Theatre in Mérida and at the St. John the Baptist Parish Church in Motul.
For the concert in Mérida, a children’s choir, Los Niños Cantores de Yucatan, is sharing the bill with Chor Musica.
In total, 46 people will be making the trip, 28 choir members and 18 companions. The group is leaving Powell River on Tuesday, March 12 and catching a flight to Cancun the following day. From there they hop on a bus to Mérida.
The entire 10-day trip has been organized with the assistance of Ralf Hollmann, a businessman who lives in Mexico, but who grew up in Powell River and has strong ties with the academy. Heron said he has been in contact with Hollmann since the beginning. “We started about a year ago,” Heron said. “This would have been a nightmare to try and arrange without Ralf.”
All arrangements had to go through the cultural attaché, said Heron. “Every one of the venues we’re going to was chosen by the cultural branch of the Yucatan government.”
For Don James, the director of Chor Musica, the trip will be his fourth choir tour of Mexico. The first remains memorable, James said, adding it ties in with the recent Academy Awards in which Argo won best picture. The film is about the rescue of six United States diplomats from Tehran, Iran, during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. The six Americans found safe haven in a pair of official Canadian residences and the Canadian ambassador, Ken Taylor, was universally credited for saving their lives.
James was the conductor of the Powell River Boys’ Choir in 1979 and the group had a concert tour in Mexico. “The American ambassador put the choir up in a place like the Vancouver Hotel in Guadalajara, arranged a place in a theatre like the Orpheum, where the Vienna Boys’ Choir was singing the next night, all gratis, as a thanks to Canada,” said James. “He provided a bus for us, took us out to another village where we gave another concert. We covered quite a few parts of Mexico on that tour.”
James has also been on tours in Mexico with the Powell River Youth Choir and the Academy Chamber Choir.
The men are sounding good, James said, and they’re working hard. “We’re taking a very interesting program down there,” he said. “It’s a mix of all kinds of songs, including some Mexican, ranging from Gregorian chant right through to modern.”
James expects one of the highlights of the concerts will be Tobin Stokes’ Hunker Down, which describes Powell River in the grip of a storm.
