Schools

40 Howell Chorus Students Will Sing For Obamas At Carnegie Hall

Friday, Dec. 1, the students will be part of a 200-member choir for "The Way of the Rain — Voices of Hope" that focuses on climate change.

HOWELL, NJ — Regina McAllen says her students Howell High School chorus students have been to Carnegie Hall in New York City before.

"We've been performing at Carnegie Hall for the past 10 years," McAllen said, as part of the hall's winter holiday concert. On Friday, her students will again be performing at the famed concert hall, but this time, it will have a decidedly different feeling.

"Normally they're performing for the sake of the music," McAllen said Thursday during a quick break in the final tuneups for the performance. "They're not used to performing for causes."

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The Howell students — 40 chorus members in all — will be performing Friday night in "The Way of the Rain — Voices of Hope," with some well-known celebrities who are lending their talents and influence to raise awareness of environmental issues and raise funds for the National Resources Defense Council.

The world premiere of the concert is at 8 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 1. Tickets are still available for the event, according to the Carnegie Hall website.

Find out what's happening in Howellwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The event was conceived by environmental artist Sibylle Szaggars Redford, whose husband, actor Robert Redford, will appear, as will former Vice President Al Gore, who has been an active and vocal advocate for addressing climate change. Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet N. Scott Momaday, who is a proponent of the vanishing Native American oral tradition, has a monologue, according to a Forbes article on the performance. Also performing will be multi-platinum-selling artist Loreena McKennitt, Grammy Award-winning artist Robert Mirabal, Celtic violinist Máiréad Nesbitt, and Lynn Hilary, from "Celtic Woman" and "Riverdance."

The Howell students, all of whom are part of the Freehold Regional High School District's Performing Art magnet program, will be part of a 200-member high school chorus that also will include students from High Point Regional and Mount Olive high schools, according to the Facebook page of "The Way of the Rain." The high school choir will be performing with the Chesapeake Youth Symphony Orchestra as the narration for the two-hour performance.

They also will be performing for some special guests; McAllen said she had just been notified on Thursday that Barack and Michelle Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton would be in attendance at the performance, which is making its world premiere.

McAllen said the Howell students all are members of either the All-State or All-Shore choruses, which she believes played a role in why Howell was among the three schools chosen.

"We had the most members, 22, on the All-State chorus," she said. They were notified in September and have been rehearsing ever since.

Their preparations included a visit from Sibylle Szaggars Redford earlier in November.

"She was an amazing person," McAllen said. "She was so warm and engaging and passionate."

After speaking with the students for about 45 minutes, she stayed and accepted hugs from them, "which I know sounds like an odd response, but that's the effect she had on them," McAllen said.

Read more about her visit here.

"The Way of the Rain" is a story about the creation of the world, its blossoming, and then ultimately its destruction, McAllen said. Szaggars Redford is "very concerned about the risks to the national parks" of some of the proposals of the Trump administration, and this concert aims to raise money to fight those proposals.

All in all, "it makes our students think about making different choices, whether it's not grabbing that extra straw or using a paper cup instead of a plastic one.

According to the event's website, "The Way of the Rain was inspired by the annual monsoon rains that sustain life on the fragile landscape of the high-desert plateaus of the Southwest." It "invites the audience to remember their physical and spiritual connection to our planet's beauty and plight through paintings, music, dance, film, light and spoken word."

It aims to explore the issue of climate change resulting in rapidly changing weather patterns and illustrates crucial environmental dilemmas through performance art, the website said.

"If we keep hurting the earth, we hurt ourselves," she said. "We rely on you, the next generation … to inspire people to want to make the world safe and beautiful for us and for future generations."

Szaggars Redford also spoke to students in the Howell Fine & Performing Arts Center's video program, and those students produced the following video:

Photo via Freehold Regional High School District Facebook page


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