Orpheus Male Chorus celebrates 90th season
The holidays are all about tradition, and in Arizona, few traditions go back as far as the annual Christmas show by the Orpheus Male Chorus of Phoenix.
“One of our first concerts was on KTAR radio, Christmas Day 1929,” says Dave Kelly, a retired Phoenix police officer who has been singing with the choir for more than four decades.
Originally known as the Orpheus Club, the group marks its 90th anniversary season this year, which, thanks to the squirrelly math of decades and centuries, means the volunteer choir is actually 89 years old. Among the state’s performing-arts organizations, only Phoenix Theatre and the Tucson Symphony Orchestra claim to have been performing longer.
Over the years, Orpheus has toured the world, commissioned world-premiere compositions and released eight recordings. Mixing and matching classical, folk, pop and show tunes, the group also sponsors the Boys to Men festival every November, which gives Arizona junior-high and high-school students a chance to sing for top conductors.
“I heard Orpheus 40 years ago at Gammage Auditorium, and I will never forget it,” says eight-year member Gary Hapip. “There were about 100 men in the chorus, and the sound was so unique and so strong that it was completely different than anything I had ever heard, and it got my attention.”
This year’s “Holidays With Orpheus” concert will feature season favorites as well as a good dose of dad jokes — even if these dudes are so old they’ve never heard of dad jokes.
“We’ve got a bunch of guys that like to play around, and we’ll do a shtick song,” Kelly says. “This year is ‘The Twelve Days After Christmas,’ and they’re going to do something that will surprise even
us, because we won’t get to see it until the final rehearsal.”
But don’t let that fool you into thinking Orpheus doesn’t take music seriously.
That hasn’t always been true. The group has had its ups and downs, including a bona fide schism about 15 years ago when a number of singers who preferred a more casual atmosphere split off into the Choralaires, since disbanded. But under current artistic director Brook Carter Larson, a former voice professor at Arizona State University, Orpheus has rebuilt its membership and renewed its artistic ambition.
“For a long, long time, it was a social group,” Kelly says. “There wasn’t a lot of singing and performing. It got to the point where the guys wanted to get better, to increase our ability, and as a result we started to focus more on our music.”