Here I Am [World Premiere Recordings]

True Concord’s newest album, Here I Am, features two world premiere recordings of works by Jocelyn Hagen. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci has been performed more than 50 times around the world since 2019, incorporating visuals, sound, light and movement. Here I Am was inspired by conductor Eric Holtan’s suggestion that Hagen should write a piece celebrating the women’s suffrage movement and the centennial of the 19th Amendment in 2020. This piece is performed with live concert projections of portraits of 47 inspiring women from across the world and across time, whose words form the libretto. Hagen plans to create a future video of the images synched with the music on this album. Here I Am was recorded in outstanding fidelity by engineer John Polito and produced by GRAMMY®-award winner Peter Rutenberg of Los Angeles. Recorded May 28–31, 2024, at Camelback Bible Church, Paradise Valley, Arizona. Founded in 2004 by Founding Music Director Eric Holtan, the Tucson, Arizona-based True Concord Voices & Orchestra made its New York City debut at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in September 2015 with Mozart’s Requiem and Stephen Paulus’s Prayers and Remembrances. That same year, True Concord debuted on the international stage with its first album on Reference Recordings®, Far in the Heavens: Choral Music of Stephen Paulus, which received a GRAMMY® nomination for Best Choral Performance, while the late Stephen Paulus won the GRAMMY® for Best Classical Contemporary Composition posthumously. True Concord received its second GRAMMY® nomination in 2024 for A Dream So Bright: Choral Music of Jake Runestad, also on Reference Recordings®. Jocelyn Hagen composes music that has been described as “simply magical” (Fanfare) and “dramatic and deeply moving” (Minnesota Star Tribune). She is a pioneer in the field of composition, pushing the expectations of musicians and audiences with large-scale, multimedia works, electro-acoustic music, dance, opera, and publishing. Her first forays into composition were via songwriting—still very evident in her work. The majority of her compositions are for the voice—solo, chamber, and choral. Her melodic music is rhythmically driven and texturally complex, rich in color, and deeply heartfelt. In 2023, Minnesota Opera premiered Hagen’s opera The Song Poet, written with Hmong writer Kao Kalia Yang and sold out their run over six months prior to the first performance. In 2019, Hagen celebrated the premiere of her multimedia symphony The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, including video projections created by a team of visual artists and highlighting da Vinci’s spectacular drawings, inventions, and texts.

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Susanna Phillips, Soprano True Concord Voices & Orchestra Eric Holtan, Conductor