Gabriela Hristova will serve as guest conducter at the March 16 concert.
Gabriela Hristova, associate professor of music and director of choral activities at the University of Michigan-Flint, remembers the confusion on campus as the Flint water crisis unfolded in 2014. Lead leached into the city’s drinking water, triggering poisoning and multiple criminal charges.
“One day we noticed that the water in our bathrooms and water fountains at the university was yellow-brown,” Hristova, an award-winning choir director, says. She and her colleagues blamed a heavy rain and waited for the water to run clear, but it didn’t. “We stopped using it. No one knew what was happening or why the water was brown.”
The university put new filters on all water fountains and bathroom sinks, but Hristova says that news of the dangerous lead levels and the number of people affected didn’t come for many months.
A few years later, composer Andrea Ramsey wrote a choral piece, But a Flint Holds Fire, to raise awareness and money for the ongoing crisis. Lead poisoning is especially damaging to children, and the spoken words in her song — written by children who experienced the crisis — reflect their vulnerable and wounded feelings.
Hristova will conduct the piece in Madison on March 16 when she will serve as guest conductor for the Festival Choir of Madison’s concert, A Thousand Beautiful Dreams. The University of Michigan-Flint Chamber Singers, a student choir that has toured nationally and internationally, will also perform at the concert at Madison’s First Unitarian Society. Accompanists will include pianists Ted Reinke and Katena Dinas, and percussionist Todd Hammes.
Sergei Pavlov, artistic director of the Festival Choir, says the concert began to take shape when he talked to Hristova at a choral conference last year. They looked at music that explored topics from the earthly to the spiritual — the need for clean drinking water, social justice, spiritual renewal and compassion.
The performance begins with “Ukuthula,” a Zulu prayer for peace, and continues with songs that explore styles from Gregorian chant in “Vidi Aquam” to Caribbean rhythms in “Turn the World Around.”
The program ends with the Madison premiere of Craig Hella Johnson’s “All of Us,” part of a larger work titled Considering Matthew Shepard. Shepard was tortured and killed in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998 because of his sexual orientation. His death prompted changes to hate crime laws.
While some songs in the concert might take audience members out of their comfort zones, Pavlov says that all of them have a message of hope and love. “That is the message of all the songs we sing and, in our case, it is double-distilled love, once by the composers and once by us, the performers.”
