Season Albums

Our December 2024 concert, Once, as I Remember, followed the form of the Festival of Lessons and Carols presented annually by the King’s College choir in Cambridge, England, but with poetry readings in place of the traditional scripture lessons. The Spring concert, The Gift to Sing, on March 23, 2025 featured a newly commissioned setting from composer Jonathan Woody of “The Gift to Sing” by James Weldon Johnson.

We ended the season singing Mozart’s Requiem and Coronation Mass for a large and appreciative audience. The performance featured a large orchestra and four talented soloists, two of whom have a Kent Singers family connection: Bass soloist Dylan Armstrong’s mother, Sue Ellen Armstrong, sings in our alto section, and his wife, Sarah Armstrong, was our soprano soloist! (The other soloists were Megan Roth, mezzo-soprano, and Matthew Newhouse, tenor.)

We opened our 51th season in December 2023 with A Rose in Winter, a gentle and beautiful program of music expressing joy, hope and peace. The Spring concert, The Peace of Wild Things, on March 10, 2024 featured Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb, Randall Thompson’s Frostiana (organ and piano played brilliantly by our accompanist, Sandra Kleisner), and two pieces by the young American composer, Jake Runestad: The Hope of Loving and The Peace of Wild Things.

The audience for our Summer Great Works Concert on June 2, 2024 was treated to three delightful pieces from the Baroque period: Vivaldi’s Gloria, Handel’s Coronation Anthems, and Czech composer Jan Dismas Zelenka’s Magnificat in D Major.

Founded in 1972 by music director Jon Lafleur, the Kent Singers began its 50th season in December 2022 with Welcome Yule!, a collection of our favorite selections from past holiday concerts. The Spring concert, A Jubilant Song, on March 19, 2023, celebrated the power of music and song in our lives.

On June 11, 2023 we presented our Great Works concert for this year, featuring Schubert’s Mass No. 6 in E-flat and Haydn’s Te Deum No. 2 in C Major with soloists and orchestra. The audience responded to this final concert of our season with an enthusiastic standing ovation.

After presenting our holiday concert for the 2019-2020 season, Among Angels, we began rehearsals for our planned Spring concert, Songs of the British Isles. Unfortunately the global COVID pandemic forced us to cancel the Spring concert, and our planned Summer concert as well.

We spent the pandemic year of 2021 learning all twenty choruses of Handel’s Messiah with individual study, guided practice videos made by our director, and weekly Zoom meetings to check in with each other and socialize. We resumed live rehearsals in Fall 2021 with strict health safety protocols, and resumed our work on the British Isles repertoire. After a two year delay, that concert was presented in March 2022.

Immediately afterward we began rehearsals for Messiah, singing the choruses together as a group for the first time. Thanks to all that practicing we did at home during our 2021 “virtual season,” Messiah came together quickly resulting in a very successful performance on June 12, 2022 with soloists and orchestra of period instruments.