A season opener with civic purpose
On a Sunday afternoon built for reflection as much as resonance, the Elgin Master Chorale opens its 79th season, “Voices of America,” with a program anchored to Abraham Lincoln’s call for unity. “With Malice Toward None” arrives November 2, 2025, at 3:30 p.m. in the Blizzard Theatre at Elgin Community College, with the Elgin Symphony Orchestra joining as special guests, according to Elgin Master Chorale. The repertoire places American ideals—justice, compassion, hope—front and center in a moment when those words feel both fragile and necessary.
“This concert asks what it truly means to live out the ideals that define us,” said Music Director Andrew Lewis. “Each composer, in their own way, reaches for light in dark times, reminding us that empathy and understanding are the truest measures of a nation’s strength,” he added, as shared by Elgin Master Chorale.
A program built for these times
The afternoon’s arc is deliberate. It pairs Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna with Florence Price’s Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight and Randall Thompson’s The Testament of Freedom, weaving a musical dialogue about grief, resolve, and democratic promise, according to Elgin Master Chorale. Framed by Lincoln’s exhortation to bind up the nation’s wounds, the selections ask listeners to hear the past as prologue and the present as a call to neighborliness.
Price’s presence is pivotal. The composer is widely recognized as the first African American woman to gain national prominence as a symphonic composer, a milestone that continues to reshape how American repertoire is curated and taught, as outlined by Florence Price. Programming her Lincoln meditation alongside Thompson’s World War II–era ode and Lauridsen’s luminous plea for consolation turns the concert into a civic conversation as much as a choral one.
That conversation begins before the first downbeat. A pre-concert talk at 2:45 p.m. brings author Bill Farina together with Maestro Lewis to explore Price’s legacy and the program’s historical resonance, according to Elgin Master Chorale.
A local chorus with a long memory
For this ensemble, the scale of the questions fits the scale of its history. Founded in 1947 as the Elgin Choral Union and rebranded as Elgin Master Chorale in 2014, the chorus has evolved alongside the city it serves, according to Elgin Master Chorale. The group counts roughly 85 volunteer singers from across the Fox Valley and performs as the ensemble in residence at Elgin Community College—an institutional partnership that has tied major works and community ritual to the same stage for generations, as noted by Elgin Master Chorale.
The guest collaboration also carries local meaning. The Elgin Symphony Orchestra is a regional mainstay with a broad season that spans Classics, Pops, educational, and holiday programs—about 40 performances annually—underscoring its central role in the area’s musical life, according to Elgin Symphony Orchestra. Hearing chorus and orchestra together on a program devoted to American ideals promises a depth of color and momentum that only a full complement of players can deliver.
Why Florence Price matters here
Price’s life and work have become touchstones for ensembles seeking to tell a fuller story of American music. As documented by Florence Price, her recognition as a pathbreaking symphonic composer invites audiences to reconsider who gets remembered—and how our national memory is scored. In a city that prizes inclusivity in its civic fabric, that invitation lands close to home.
Elgin is one of the region’s most diverse communities, with a population of about 115,000 and a robust civic infrastructure for the arts—from parks and museums to well over 100 places of worship, according to the City of Elgin. Festivals and seasonal gatherings knit that diversity together through shared experiences; events like the Elgin Community Festival and Christmas in Elgin reflect a local appetite for coming together in public spaces, as described by Housenix. A concert that foregrounds empathy and common purpose feels attuned to that civic rhythm.
The music and the moment
Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna, long cherished for its shimmering lines and consoling texts, opens a corridor to remembrance—a fitting companion to Thompson’s sturdy, declarative Testament, and the tender, searching lines of Price’s Lincoln portrait. While each piece inhabits a distinct sound world, together they tilt toward consolation without complacency, a balance that mirrors Lincoln’s own insistence on mercy paired with resolve, as framed by Elgin Master Chorale.
Such balance is not accidental. The season theme “Voices of America” invites listeners to hear these works not as museum pieces but as living arguments about who we are and who we mean to be, according to Elgin Master Chorale. In performance, that argument becomes communal—hundreds of breaths aligning on a single phrase, an orchestra’s swell lifting a chorus’s vow.
When and how to join
The performance takes place Sunday, November 2, 2025, at 3:30 p.m. at the Blizzard Theatre at Elgin Community College; a free pre-concert talk begins at 2:45 p.m., according to Elgin Master Chorale. Tickets start at $28, with discounts available for students, teachers, active-duty and military veterans, first responders, and seniors, as detailed by Elgin Master Chorale.
For a chorus that traces its roots to 1947 and still sings with the energy of 85 neighbors, a program built on Lincoln’s moral clarity and Price’s overdue recognition does more than open a season. It invites a city—diverse, civic-minded, and proud of its cultural life—to lean in, listen closely, and test the strength of shared ideals in real time, a proposition as local as Elgin’s stages and as American as the songs themselves.
