A Sneak Peek at PEV's 2023-24 Season

 By Ash Walker

 I’m so excited to share a sneak peek at our 2023-24 season with you! It will be my fourth season with PEV (already!), and we have such a tremendous and diverse group of singers that I can’t wait to showcase for you.

We’ll open the season in early December with a program called “Canciones de Luz” – Songs of Light. It explores and celebrates music of the Spanish diaspora, as well as other seasonal delights. The program will feature Argentinian, Basque and Mexican works in Spanish and Indigenous languages from across the Americas. PEV singers will be joined by drums, guitar, harpsichord and more. It will be a lively and joyous musical experience for everyone!

In the spring, we’ll present a program called “The Sound Garden,” a multicultural and multimedia celebration of community, music and love for all ages that we’ll be performing indoors and outside. This is a program I’ve been wanting to create for a long while. It is inspired by William Blake’s famous poem of social and religious protest from 1794, Garden of Love (see text below).

With this program, we seek to unbind Blake’s briars and unlock the gates to a garden of sound and love for everyone. The music will be wide-ranging, with works from the PEV archive as well as new-to-us works from Africa, Asia and across the new world.  Heads up: There will also be opportunities for our audience to interact with the show via phone apps … stay tuned for more on that!

We’re also looking forward to a second collaboration with the Oakland Symphony (of which I am now honored to be the chorus director!). PEV will be participating in the world premiere of an Oakland commission Here I Stand: Paul Robeson, which will be the centerpiece of a terrific program called The Artist as Activist.  That is a concept that is near and dear to my heart, and you’ll see it starting to manifest in many new ways on and off the stage for PEV.

Of course, our 2023-24 season will also include our winter Gala fundraiser event , which will feature the songs of ABBA as we aim to raise funds to support our plans to travel to the Lund Choral Festival in Sweden in October 2024. We want to ensure that every PEV member is able to participate in that exciting undertaking!   And we’ll close out the season with our ever-exciting annual A Cappella Jazz & Pop concerts in June which might involve a collaboration with some special guests …. stay tuned for more news on that.

Tickets to all these exciting musical endeavors will go on sale in October. And we invite singers to audition in August to join us on stage in presenting this fantastic season. 

Meantime, I wish you all a wonderful summer!

Garden of Love

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

 And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;

So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,

That so many sweet flowers bore. 

 And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be:

And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

-William Blake, 1794