The GRAMMY® Award-winning vocal ensemble Chanticleer is known around the world as “an orchestra of voices” for its wide-ranging repertoire and dazzling virtuosity. Founded in San Francisco in 1978 by singer and musicologist Louis Botto, Chanticleer quickly took its place as one of the most prolific recording and touring ensembles in the world, selling over one million recordings and performing thousands of live concerts to audiences around the world.
Chanticleer’s repertoire is rooted in the renaissance and has expanded to include a wide range of classical, gospel, jazz, popular music, and a deep commitment to the commissioning of new compositions and arrangements. The ensemble has committed much of its vast recording catalogue to these commissions, garnering GRAMMY® Awards for its recording of Sir John Tavener’s “Lamentations & Praises” and the ambitious collection of commissioned works entitled “Colors of Love”. Chanticleer is the recipient of the Dale Warland/Chorus America Commissioning Award and the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for Adventurous Programming. Its Music Director Emeritus, Joseph H. Jennings, received the Brazeal Wayne Dennard Award for his contribution to the African-American choral tradition during his tenure with Chanticleer.
Named for the “clear-singing” rooster in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Chanticleer continues to maintain ambitious programming in its hometown of San Francisco, including a large education and outreach program and an annual concert series that includes its legendary holiday tradition, “A Chanticleer Christmas”.
As an acclaimed trombonist, composer, and producer, Delfeayo Marsalis has also dedicated his prolific career to music theatre and education. Along with the Marsalis family of musicians, including his father, Ellis, the artist was destined to a life in music.
Marsalis has toured internationally with jazz legends such as Ray Charles, Art Blakey, Max Roach, Elvin Jones, and Slide Hampton, as well as leading his own groups.
At the age of 17, Marsalis began his career as a producer and has, to date, produced over 120 recordings, garnering one Grammy® Award and several nominations.
In 2008, he formed the Uptown Jazz Orchestra, a highly entertaining ensemble that focuses on maintaining important jazz traditions, such as riff playing, New Orleans polyphony and spontaneous arrangements.
Delfeayo also formed the Uptown Music Theatre in 2000, a non-profit organization that empowers youth through musical theatre training. He has written sixteen musicals to date, based on history and/or uniting the community. In addition, he has composed over 90 songs that help introduce kids to jazz through musical theatre and has reached over 5,000 students nationally with his Swinging with the Cool School soft introduction to jazz workshops.
Marsalis has a dual bachelor’s degree in music performance and production from Berklee College of Music and a master's in jazz performance from the University of Louisville. He has also been conferred a doctorate from the New England College.
The School of Performing Arts welcomes you to see one of the most important releases in the history of film, Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent masterwork, "Metropolis". The film is known as the first full-length feature in the science-fiction genre, bringing together a vision of what life might be one-hundred years into the future – 2026! Inspired by the New York skyline, modernist art deco style, and futuristic robots, the film is a must-see for those who enjoy viewing masterworks of film. The film will be accompanied on the magnificent Founders Recital Hall organ by silent-film historian and acclaimed musician Ben Model.
Not an official offering of Woodbine Productions, the SDSU School of Performing Arts is pleased to bring Ben Model back by popular demand.
Generously supported by Doug and Sandy Oleson, this feature is offered to raise awareness of the pipe organ in Founders Recital Hall within the Oscar Larson Performing Arts Center.
Dubbed “the last leading man” by The New York Times, Tony Award-winner Brian Stokes Mitchell has enjoyed a career that spans more than 40 years in Broadway, television, film, recordings, and concert appearances with the country’s finest conductors and orchestras.
Mr. Mitchell received Tony, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle awards for his star turn in Kiss Me, Kate. He also gave Tony-nominated performances in Man of La Mancha, August Wilson’s King Hedley II, and Ragtime. Other notable Broadway shows include Kiss of the Spider Woman, Jelly’s Last Jam, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and most recently Shuffle Along. Off Broadway performances include Do Re Mi, Carnival, Kismet, and The Bandwagon at City Center Encores and Much Ado About Nothing at the Delacorte Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park. Regional performances include Sweeney Todd at the Sondheim Celebration at The Kennedy Center with Christine Baranski and The Light in the Piazza at the Los Angeles Opera with Renee Fleming.
Stokes was four days from opening LOVE/LIFE at City Center Encores when all of Broadway, and most of the country, shut down due to the pandemic. However, that didn’t stop him completely. Even while recovering from Covid in March of 2020, he received unexpected additional acclaim and attention for singing The Impossible Dream from his apartment window every night for a number of weeks during the pandemic in honor of the essential workers.
La Bohème, an Opera in four acts by Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (Italian librettoby Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa) that premiered at the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy, on February 1, 1896. The story, a sweetly tragic romance, was based on the episodic novel Scènes de la vie de bohème (1847–49; “Scenes of Bohemian Life”) by French writer Henri Murger. A success from the beginning, it is one of the most frequently performed of all operas.
Sung in Italian with super titles in English.
Puccini’s classic tale is about four struggling bohemians – a poet, a painter, a musician, and a philosopher who are living together in Paris, when one freezing Christmas Eve, their lives are changed forever. Teatro Lirico D’Europa presents this masterpiece with chorus, orchestra, soloists, sets and costumes. The evening will include a special feature with top students from the South Dakota State University School of Performing Arts. It will be truly grand!