To celebrate the release of their stunning holiday album Holiday Harmonies: Songs of Christmas, Essential Voices USA will offer a show at Feinstein’s/54 Below. With pieces by Max Reger, Nico Muhly and Jennifer Higdon, the album is one of the chorus’ most wonderful albums to date. We had the opportunity to speak to their extraordinary conductor Judith Clurman, who told us about the upcoming show, putting the album together, working with some of the world’s best composers and what 2016 will bring for Essential Voices USA.

What have you prepared for the show at 54 Below? Is it a release party for the album?

It started that way, but the two solo singers Jamie Barton and Maureen McKay won’t be able to be in New York, because they’re performing in operas all over the world. So we’ll do a release party and feature the “Silent Night” that Tedd Firth and I arranged and we’re trying out a fun thing, instead of having a mezzo soprano soloist I’m going to teach the audience those lines, so they can sing along with us. The whole audience will get to sing the world premiere! The beginning piece will be “Angels We Have Heard on High” which was arranged by David Chase, as well as “Merry Christmas Wishing Well”, carols and other Broadway pieces.

Was it easy at all to select the pieces for the album?

That’s a fabulous question. I’m a musician, I love music, but narrowing things down is always difficult, but when I program, whether it be for a concert or a CD, I have to think about my performing forces, where we’re going to perform, who’s performing...funny, I chose each piece for a different reason, three of them were written for me and I got involved in the arrangements, so it was a great time.

I was so fascinated by the fact that Nico Muhly wrote a piece for the album.

I met Nico Muhly at Juilliard and I got him back into the choral world way back in 2002, in each of my recordings there’s a Nico Muhly piece. We’re bonded as colleagues, teachers, friends and I commissioned him to write “Whispered and Revealed” for the album. Every piece in the recording is different, and I hope people listen to it as a through-composed recording, even though we are in the age of people making playlists with songs they’ve downloaded.

I like you brought this up, because the album does tell a story, it grows with you. It escalates.

Thank you very much, it’s 24 minutes of music and it’s packaged like a mailer so people can send it as a Christmas card, very different than anything out there. Speaking of putting music together, I’m obsessive about that, but also after you record and set the order, I hope that people will listen to it in order and listen to it the old fashioned way.

The album is both warm and majestic, like entering a cathedral, but also having eggnog next to the fireplace. How were you able to achieve this?

I was thinking about my album when I heard Simon Rattle conduct the Berlin Philharmonic, I describe my work as very human, and as humans we experience the gamut of emotions, like in music going from pianissimo to forte. It’s my job whether it be or two minutes or thirty seconds to convey all of those emotions together. When I programmed this CD I needed to love the text, to be able to convey what you experience.

The album caps off what’s been a marvelous year for Essential Voices USA.

Isn’t it great? Essential Voices USA is a different sort of group than many, in that I can go from working with eight people to a hundred people, the CD is my professional nucleus with many volunteers joining in, we recorded it at the American Academy so we didn’t have a big space and we had limited time and resources, but when we sing at Carnegie Hall we have a big space and the music’s different, so we use more volunteers. Whatever I do I think about who’s singing and why, and all I can say is if a person can sing Mozart and Sondheim, I’m a happy person.

One of the best things I saw all year long was the Beyond Broadway event featuring Stephen Schwartz, Andrew Lippa and Maury Yeston among others.

Oh my goodness, I’d forgotten about that! Thank you. You saw the model of the chorus then, you saw that all you need are the best singers to make things work.

It made me realize the chorus is like a living organism.

Thank you, that really means a lot to me.

What’s next for Essential Voices USA in the year to come?

I’ll tell you before we tell anybody, we’re doing 54 Below and The New York Pops in December. The big chorus will be singing “Angels We Have Heard on High” at Carnegie Hall, which excites me, it’s always a joy to conduct there. In the spring, on March 30th, I’m going to do another composer’s peak, and I’m assembling that now, it’s going to be called “Austrian Emigres: Schoenberg, von Trapp and the Power of Music”, we’ll be doing music by Arnold Schoenberg with the arrangement that David Chase wrote for me when I conducted the 50th anniversary concert of The Sound of Music in Salzburg. Then we have other really things brewing, but we’re not ready to announce those just yet.

I wish I could’ve attended the Salzburg concert!

It was very touching to me to work in the Mozarteum on many levels. I look forward to repeating this new montage of the music of The Sound of Music in New York City, it’s quite beautiful, and it will be fun to have Rodgers and Hammerstein experts along with Schoenberg’s son, discussing the power of music as related to the immigrant experience.

For more information on Holiday Harmonies: Songs of Christmas click here.