elebrating its 25th Anniversary Season, the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, under the direction of Anne Tomlinson, performed the first of two “holiday” concerts on St. Nicholas Eve in Pasadena’s Presbyterian Church. The concert featured the inaugural performance by LACC’s new Young Men’s Ensemble, conducted by Steven Kronauer.

The program consisted of a potpourri of multicultural offerings sung by the Concert and Intermediate Choirs, in addition to the Young Men. In the tradition of this chorus, everything was well prepared and beautifully sung. The audience, as might be expected, fairly teamed with parents and families, and in fact, felt more like an in-house recital on an evening of pouring rain that probably dampened the enthusiasm for some would-have-been attendees.

No particular item on the program deserves more mention than the initial offerings by Dr. Kronauer’s boys, a setting by Nicholas Nicassio of four Emily Dickinson poems composed for this event. The sound produced by this ensemble was fulsome, pitch-accurate and above all, musical.

The addition of this ensemble provides hope that in the future, LACC will also give the unchanged boys’ voices a chance to “speak out” with their own natural instruments, finally unfettered by the need to blend with the girls who greatly outnumber them. The combination of unchanged boys’ voices with the Young Men would be a wonderful addition to the cultural life of greater Los Angeles.