City Choir + NSO: Sound Health Initiative

Singing is good for your health! Sound Health Fridays with the City Choir of Washington are a great way to start your day, warm up your voice, body, and soul, and get some unique—and hands-on—insight into the NSO’s concert program of the day led by City Choir’s artistic director Erin Freeman. Our partnership with the National Symphony Orchestra's Sound Health Fridays continues in the 2024/25 season. These fun and innovative pre-concert interactive events focus on singing and wellness.

City Choir is thrilled to partner with the NSO as part of the their Sound Health Initiative. 2024/25 Season Sound Health Fridays will take place on November 1, 2024, January 17, 2025, March 14, 2025 & May 2, 2025. All are welcome to attend these free events—please join us and sing along (or just sit back and listen)!

From 10-11 am on select Fridays throughout the season, join conductor Erin Freeman, assistant conductor Kathleen Jagielski, and singers from the City Choir of Washington at the Kennedy Center’s The REACH ahead of an NSO “coffee concert.” You’ll hear a short performance by members of City Choir, participate in a vocal warmup, and engage in a singalong featuring music chosen by Maestra Freeman to illustrate some of the themes from that day’s NSO matinee performance.

Past programs have featured singalongs of Scottish folk tunes, woven by Maestra Freeman into an introduction of Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony; Italian songs from the popular and operatic repertoire to celebrate Respighi’s Roman Trilogy; and even the major leitmotifs of Wagner’s operas—complete with a 16-minute synopsis of the Ring Cycle—to enhance the audience’s appreciation for “Ring Without Words.”

These events are free to the public, but please register in advance with the NSO [LINK coming soon; please see information from last season here].

P h o t o s

Photos: Rachel Tester | Video: Chris Thorne

Please enjoy this description of our inaugural event in April 2023:

On the rainy morning of Friday, April 28, 2023, more than 50 singers from the City Choir of Washington gathered at Studio J of the Kennedy Center’s The REACH to embark on a new partnership with the National Symphony Orchestra’s Sound Health Initiative. Led by City Choir’s artistic director Erin Freeman and assistant conductor Katie Jagielski, with Peter Uhlir at the piano, singers performed a short program of repertoire from recent and upcoming concerts including W.A. Mozart’s Ave verum corpus, Aaron Copland’s Long Time Ago, Simple Gifts, and I Bought me a Cat, and concluded with a City Singers’ (City Choir’s engagement chorus) favorite, We’ll Meet Again, by Hughie Charles & Ross Parker (arranged by Roger Emerson). 

For the rest of the program, City Choir’s singers joined the audience for a vocal warm up (partly based on Mendelssohn’s theme for Fingal’s Cave, on the NSO’s concert program later that morning) and singalong! With a booklet of music and lyrics created by Erin and printed by the NSO’s manager of community engagement, Xavier Joseph, choristers and audience members alike raised their voices in song, together enjoying classics such as Lift Every Voice, America the Beautiful, O What a Beautiful Mornin’, Do Re Mi, Over the Rainbow, Auld Lang Syne, and more. Afterwards, the audience and some singers headed to the Kennedy Center concert hall for the NSO’s performance of Schubert and Mendelssohn. 

The members of City Choir who took part were moved just as much as the audience. “There was a woman in the audience tearing up during Ave verum corpus,” said soprano Emily Hantman Tsai. “I sang directly to her for the entire piece, and got a little choked up myself. It is so incredible to sing in an intimate space and feel just how much our art touches people.” Tenor David Flaxman noted, “It’s always fun singing the City Singers repertoire, but watching Erin instruct the audience on some aspects of singing and then joining them for a singalong was a real treat. City Choir is about music and community!” 

The City Choir of Washington is excited to continue its partnership with the National Symphony Orchestra in the 2024/25 season, leading multiple Friday morning sings as part of the NSO’s Sound Health initiative. We are very grateful to Xavier Joseph and Genevieve Twomey of the NSO for giving us this wonderful opportunity to spread our love of music throughout the greater DC area, and we look forward to more collaborations in the future.