Uniting Voices Chicago returns for McBride’s The Movement Revisited

Fresh from their Winter Glow concerts at Symphony Center, the exuberant young singers of Uniting Voices Chicago will be back on stage Feb 2 to join eight-time Grammy Award-winning composer, bassist and bandleader Christian McBride and the Chicago Jazz Orchestra. The program is a special work appropriately acknowledged as McBride’s magnum opus as composer: The Movement Revisited, a big band plus gospel choir tribute to the civil rights movement.

McBride’s labor of love — musical portraits of civil rights icons such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Muhammad Ali as well as Chicago’s own Rosa Parks and Barack Obama — will depend on the special help of young local voices in the exuberant mix: Uniting Voices Chicago.

Formerly known as the Chicago Children’s Choir, Uniting Voices Chicago was itself inspired by the Civil Rights Movement: founded in 1956 in Hyde Park at the First Unitarian Church of Chicago with trust in the idea that music could build bridges toward mutual respect among young people of all races, ethnicities and neighborhoods, the group has evolved into a broad Chicago-area network of in-school and after-school programs, presently impacting 3,159 singers, 78 schools and 135 choirs, according to the website.

“When I got to the Chicago Children’s Choir, its mission of bringing music education into the schools and neighborhoods, making it access-free for every child, seemed a beautiful mission to me,” said Josephine Lee, who signed on with the organization as artistic director in 1999 and became the organization’s president in 2010.

“We want to give every child that chance to cultivate a love of music,” Lee said. “I think every child should have that opportunity to stand onstage and be a part of the creation. Only then will they understand the true meaning of what it means to be a great artist, and to appreciate great music, and to think of the Symphony Center as their home.”

Nearly 80 percent of students participate free of charge, according to Lee, who added that all training is subsidized to some extent: “The possibility for the students to work with world-class ensembles, and to serve as ambassadors for music, has been extraordinary." Alumni now exceed 50,000.

You may have seen the young singers onstage in 2017 at Symphony Center with music director Riccardo Muti and the actor Gérard Depardieu in Prokofiev’s Ivan the Terrible. The CSO took that project to Carnegie Hall, where critics singled out the young singers with high fives for their tender cameo.

At the Ravinia Festival, too, the youth added their voices to Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony, led by Marin Alsop, the chief conductor and curator of the CSO’s summer residency. “And they had sung at Ravinia before,” Lee said. “To think that these were our kids from all over Chicago (in 2018 and again in 2019) performing in Bernstein’s Mass, and to have it recorded for nationwide broadcast on PBS, is to understand how powerful these opportunities are.”

Uniting Voices Chicago members have been featured at the Lyric Opera in six productions since 2019, strutting as child soldiers in Carmen, intoning the children’s prayer in Hansel and Gretel, etc. More recently, primo opportunities for the young singers to appear at the Lollapalooza festival beckoned.

And you can’t talk about Uniting Voices Chicago without noting that some of its teenage members capped off the year 2023 on Saturday Night Live with Colombian pop sensation Karol G. as they sang “Mientras me curo del cora” (And as I heal from my heart”) broadcast nationwide.

For her part, Uniting Voices Chicago’s president Lee was Chicago-born and Chicago-educated: “I was trained as a pianist, violinist and singer. Dmitry Paperno accepted me as a piano student at age 16 and remains one of my all-time great mentors. Then I took a masters in conducting at Northwestern University and began to forge partnerships with all the major institutions.”

Lee was already preparing young choral singers for the CSO in works such as Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 under Christoph Eschenbach at Medinah Temple back in 1996. Donald Palumbo brought her to the Lyric Opera to prepare children’s choruses before he moved on to the Metropolitan Opera.

The need for young people to sequester during COVID dealt a special blow to the group’s city-wide choral efforts. The singers couldn’t assemble to rehearse. Even so, some positive trends emerged in combating the mental health impact of the epidemic. Choral members from all parts of the city stay connected with each other digitally. And in purely technical ways related to how music is made, the young people had keen interest: they were able to utilize some of their digital skills in various recording efforts.

Now back onstage live, the young artists of Uniting Voices Chicago have been exceedingly fortunate in their continuing opportunity to work at an early age with internationally known professionals. In March 2023, they sang with the Chicago Symphony Chorus and Orchestra in Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana at Symphony Center, Osmo Vänskä conducting. And Winter Glow matinee concerts this season at Symphony Center featured Uniting Voices Chicago with a thousand singers from choruses all over the city — Englewood, Gage Park, Humboldt Park, Lincoln Park, Pilsen, Rogers Park, Dimension, Albany Park, Austin, and West Town.

Over the years and across generations, those memories add up, whether it was Verdi’s “Otello” with Sir Georg Solti in 1991, Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 (Symphony of a Thousand) with Christoph Eschenbach in 1996, Carmina Burana with Riccardo Muti in 2012, Britten’s War Requiem with Charles Dutoit in 2013, and so on up to the present.

United Voices Chicago has grown from a single choir into an internationally known network of in-school and after-school programs that operate out of twelve centers throughout Chicagoland, including so-called “Prelude” ensembles for children as young as six in Hyde Park and Lincoln Park locations, and other youth-focused music ensembles in Albany Park, Austin, Beverly, and West Town.

And at a training hub in the Loop’s Chicago Cultural Center, there is even a special program called Dimension, for singers with changing voices destined to emerge as tenor, baritone and bass. 

“It was our team’s idea,” Lee said. “For a boy soprano going into that change, it can be difficult, but it’s also exciting, and so we implemented the program in early 2000. What’s beautiful about what we do as singers is that your body is your instrument, and being able to create and be expressive, with a group, even as you work through whatever it is you’re going through is very important. You can channel happiness, sadness, angst and everything else via the music and learn to sing in 37 languages and travel for free through many different cultures, being creative and expressive within the group as the transition occurs.

“People sometimes say we have a diminishing audience for classical music,” Lee continued. “But I firmly believe it is one of the most powerful languages there is, with some of the most beautiful music to survive the generations. We have a mission to do our part in keeping the art form as vigorous and healthy as we can.”