las Cantantes
Photo by Max Woltman
The women's chorus, Las Cantantes, is directed by Dr. Maxine Thévenot. The group is comprised of about twenty singers who are selected via audition. This ensemble studies, rehearses and performs the finest literature written for treble voices. The ensemble is, at times, accompanied by other instruments such as the harp, percussion, piano, and pipe organ.
Performances occur several times throughout each academic term both on and off campus including many local churches, synagogues and concert halls.
Las Cantantes was founded in 1994 by Professor Bradley Ellingboe and during his fourteen-year tenure as its director, the group collaborated with several important musical figures and made several regional tours.
Under the direction of its new Director since Fall 2007, Dr. Maxine Thévenot and Las Cantantes—the only collegiate women's choir in the state of New Mexico—has performed many concerts in a wide variety of settings, and has recorded two internationally released CDs—My Dancing Day (2008), which features several premiere recordings of works for the Christmas season, and Dream a Little Dream (May 2010), featuring a wide variety of unaccompanied and accompanied works, including several premiere recordings of works by New Mexican composers.
Based on the success of its recordings, Las Cantantes was invited to sing concerts in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grace Church on lower Broadway, the historic Cathedral of the Incarnation, and Church of the Heavenly Rest in May 2009.
If you wish to make a tax-deductible donation to Las Cantantes to aid the many costs of operating a choral ensemble, please send an email to thevenot@unm.edu for further information on how you can help keep choral music for young people alive.
To quote a great writer, T.S. Eliot said, “You are the music, while the music lasts.”
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CONCERTS 2010/2011:
Tuesday, December 7, 2010, 7:30 p.m., Keller Hall.
Ticketed event: $8/6/4 through the UNM Box Office.
This concert will feature music for harp and women's voices with harpist Anne Eisfeller. The program will include Benjamin Britten's A Ceremony of Carols, Kirk Mechem's Seven Joys of Christmas, music of UNM faculty members Bradley Ellingboe and Richard Hermann, and favorite Christmas arrangements. Ivan Koska joins the ensemble as pianist.
Friday, March 11, 2011, 7:30 p.m., Keller Hall.
Ticketed event: $8/6/4 through the UNM Box Office.
Las Cantantes joins forces with a string orchestra to present sacred works of the Baroque era.
Monday, March 28, 2011, 7:30 p.m., Keller Hall. Free Event.
Las Cantantes will perform two works of John Robb as part of the 2011 John Donald Robb Composers' Symposium.
Friday, May 6, 2011, 7:00 p.m., The Cathedral of St. John.
Ticketed event: $20, 15, 5 (for UNM students).
Las Cantantes and the Concert Choir join forces to present an evening of sacred and secular choral repertoire.
AUDIO SAMPLES:
Ave Verum Corpus (Daley), live, Garden City, NY, 2009
Wind Song (Kidd), live, Garden City, NY, 2009
Hebe deine Augen auf (Mendelssohn), live, Garden City, 2009
Psallite (Praetorius), from CD My Dancing Day.
Personent Hodie (Rutter); harpist Lynn Gorman DeVelder, from CD My Dancing Day.
My God is a Rock (spiritual, arr. Kallmann)
RECORDINGS AVAILABLE:
Enchantment at Chimayó
I Just Lightning
Stepping Westward
My Dancing Day
Dream a Little Dream
Review of "My Dancing Day"
in American Record Guide, Nov/Dec 2010 issue
—"A tribute not just to the spirit of Christmas but to the spirited brand of music-making going on at the University of New Mexico. Las Cantantes, the University's 20-voice women's chamber choir, does the Alma Mater proud with sensitive, heartfelt singing in such spiritually-charged works as Jean Langlais's exquisite 'Ave Mundi Gloria', the jaunty 'Personent Hodie' from John Rutter's cycle of carols called Dancing Day, and the handsome 'Magnificat' for voices, marimba and oboe composed by Bradley Ellingboe, Director of Choral Activities at UNM's Department of Music. You'll hear some strain in Rutter's 'Virgin Most Pure' (also from Dancing Day) as the verses are passed between different soloists and choral subdivisions with less than unanimous results. But on the whole, the choir sounds just fine under the baton of Dr. Maxine Thevenot, an organist-conductor trained at the Manhattan School. The instrumentalists on loan from the New Mexico Symphony, Santa Fe's ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, and Albuquerque's Cathedral Church of St.John (organist Iain Quinn) are first-rate. From the sound of things, the University of New Mexico would be a wonderful place not only to share the melodies of Christmas but to study and perform music year-round. "
—Philip Greenfield
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