Choirs

They vowed to focus on the music, not the impending silence. So on Sunday night, the men of the Ellis-Orpheus Choir lifted their voices for the last time in a final concert before a packed crowd at Riviera United Methodist Church in Torrance. The 112-year-old chorus, L.A.'s oldest men's choir, is disbanding because it has been unable to attract new members to replace those who have died or lost their voices to age, said choir director Randall Schwalbe.

  That's how you start a Super Bowl. Twenty-six students from Sandy Hook Elementary School got the Super Bowl off to an emotional start as they joined Jennifer Hudson in singing "America the Beautiful" before the game on Sunday. The students, members of the school that was the scene of a mass shooting in December, gave a great performance, which you can watch above. "We have come to New Orleans to represent the Sandy Hook Family and the community of Newtown, Connecticut," the students said in a statement.

As part of the Grammy Los Angeles All-Star High School Jazz Band and Choir, Sam Sadigursky and Tyler Azelton helped dazzle about 500 parents, friends and teachers at Cal State Northridge on Tuesday. When all was said and done, the two teens learned that was just a warmup before they help Jon Secada, among other stars, dazzle the folks at the Grammy Awards nomination party and attend the awards ceremony Feb. 28.

With the rat race mostly run, conductors in their later years tend to slow down their tempos. They take time to smell the roses, to search for something new in pieces they've conducted all their lives. They dig for meaning and rest tired bones. But there are exceptions. Toscanini sped up in his final recordings. His Beethoven became staggeringly fast. Monday and Tuesday night at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, the 69-year-old John Eliot Gardiner, who clearly still has something to prove, made Toscanini seem a tortoise.

This letter is in response to the article in the Orange County Calendar on May 16, 1988, written by Bruce Burroughs, entitled "Music Review, Master Chorale Delivers Brahms and Schumann." I quote the review, "Whether it is the warm, buttery tone elicited by Robert Shaw, the bland porridge blend preferred by the late Fred Waring, or the unruly yelping of a volunteer church choir (author's emphasis) , there is as many different choral sounds as there are choruses and chorus directors."

For years, the student choirs at Los Angeles Baptist High School in North Hills have been uplifting audiences with their spirited concerts. Now, after months of hard work and fund-raising, they hope to reach even more people with their first album. Titled "Called to the Light," the $30,000 production was recorded earlier this year at a North Hollywood studio. It's an 11-song showcase of the school's New Vision Choir and the 16-member vocal group Reflections.

A gospel choir made up of at-risk Latino youths took first place in the 16th Annual McDonald's Gospelfest at the Shrine Civic Auditorium, literally stopping the show with its high-energy performance. The El Monte-based Soldiers on Soul Patrol won in the youth choir category, beating out the Los Angeles-based Testimonial Inspirational Youth Choir.

When members of Fountain Valley High School's Concert Choir perform in New York City's Carnegie Hall in April, it promises to be a high note of their lives. "It gives our choir the opportunity to showcase our talent . . . to show everybody what we've got," said senior Heath Einstein, a choir member since his freshman year. For classmate Mishel Popovich, singing at the famed concert hall is a dream come true. "One of my life's dreams is being fulfilled," said Popovich, who plans to study opera.

The Gardena High School traveling choir came to Reseda on Thursday to make a joyful noise at Leichman High School. For the second consecutive year, the students at the special education school celebrated Black History month with a concert. There was much hand clapping, head bobbing and foot tapping as the crowd got into the spirit of the music. The multicultural choir sang about the power of love. They sang about joy. They sang about peace.

Choir singers at John Burroughs High School have to struggle for their art. "It's just so difficult, pressure-wise, to know you have a show coming up and you don't have the money for it," said Patrick Shearer, a member of the chamber choir, who will be a junior. "Usually, we have a competition a week. Sometimes we have to turn it down because we don't have enough money to pay for a bus."

A Florida principal's effort to teach children to honor the heroes of Sept. 11 turned into an impromptu lesson about red tape and liability -- and a public relations nightmare for retail giant Wal-Mart. A manager at Wal-Mart's Pembroke Pines, Fla., store barred a choir made up of 8-, 9- and 10-year-olds from singing "God Bless America" inside the store Tuesday, the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to their school principal. The manager said the children were a "liability" and then called police to remove them from the property, the principal said.

Lately, attending the Crystal Cathedral has been like going to a reunion. Longtime members have returned, along with a 60-person robed choir. Traditional hymns fill the church. And on Sunday, a recognizable face unexpectedly took the pulpit for the first time in years: the Rev. Bobby Schuller, the charismatic grandson of founder the Rev. Robert H. Schuller, participated in a brief interview and read Scripture. "I'm excited to be back," he told congregants, who learned that the 30-year-old pastor will be appearing at the Crystal Cathedral on an occasional basis, while still maintaining a separate ministry in Orange.

Fittingly, "The Lord of the Rings in Concert: The Fellowship of the Ring" is an epic undertaking. "It's such a huge score," said composer Howard Shore, who won an Oscar for his work on Peter Jackson's 2001 first installment in his ambitious "Lord of the Rings" trilogy based on the J.R.R. Tolkien beloved fantasy novel. "It's nearly three hours. It is really difficult to do. It requires 225 people on stage to play the music, a symphony orchestra and chorus. " For the performance, which comes to the Honda Center in Anaheim on Saturday, Ludwig Wicki conducts the Munich Symphony Orchestra, Pacific Chorale, Phoenix Boys Choir and soloist soprano Kaitlyn Lusk.

"Courageous," the fourth entry from the filmmaking ministry of Albany, Ga's., Sherwood Baptist Church, proves a particularly clunky, tunnel-visioned vehicle whose overbearing, overlong script nearly smothers the movie's quibble-free message: Fathers must be responsible. And what of the importance of mothers here? It often feels like a case of "Oh, them. " Director Alex Kendrick and brother — and producer and co-writer — Stephen are both pastors at Sherwood Baptist. Despite the story's earnest emotional core, actions and reactions can prove overly simplistic; black-and-white when gray is so clearly called for. The many topics raised — gangs, drugs, immigration, absentee parents, poverty — are examined with didacticism and platitudes instead of by mining their inherent complexities.

Santiago Burgos has many fond memories of summer camp, but he most distinctly remembers the campfires. Every night over the crackle of the fire, all the campers would burst out in songs together. "In camp, everyone just sings out loud," Santiago said. "Not everyone can sing, but they can shout. It's such an open environment. " The 16-year-old junior at Dr. Olga Mohan High School in L.A., mellow-eyed with dark, longish hair that curls down to his collar, calls himself a shy individual who was once afraid to open up to people.

The Crystal Cathedral church in Garden Grove is involved in another controversy, this time over a covenant that choir members were asked to sign stating that God intends sex to be between married heterosexuals. "Crystal Cathedral ministries believes that it is important to teach and model the biblical view," reads the paragraph in the Crystal Cathedral Worship Choir and Worship Team Covenant that has raised the ire of some choir members. "I understand that Crystal Cathedral Ministries teaches that sexual intimacy is intended by God to only be within the bonds of marriage, between one man and one woman.

Teacher Terry Fischer taps the music stand with his pencil. "Stand up and sing pretty," he directs two dozen teenagers, rising up on sneakered toes as he urges them to reach for the high notes. The students are members of the prestigious Camerata at El Camino Real High School, an award-winning choral group that is at the top of the school's musical food chain.

Europeans were singing the praises of Crenshaw High School's Elite Choir after its recent whirlwind tour of the Continent, where it packed concert halls and churches from the banks of the Rhine to the City of Light. In its last performance of the two-week tour, beneath the flying buttresses of Paris' American Cathedral, the blue-robed choir lifted every voice in a city better known for haute couture than down-home harmonizing.

Halfway through rehearsal, the basses got an earful. "Your start is too aggressive! Like boom, boom, flap, flap, upside the head," conductor David Morrow shouted Sunday from a dark spot offstage in Club Nokia at L.A. Live. "It's not about the volume, it's about the quality. " And with that, the Morehouse College Glee Club ? the world-renowned, historically black, all-male choir that has sung at the Olympics, the Super Bowl and the funeral of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. ?

In a concrete tunnel beneath the stands at Staples Center, two workers fussed over a silver sports car, cleaning and waxing, getting it ready to be wheeled onto the arena's floor. The NBA dunk contest was still an hour or so away, but a rumor had made the rounds: Someone was going to park that car in front of the basket and jump over it, sailing all the way to the rim. "We heard that," one of the workers said. "It's going to be Blake Griffin, right?" With a choir singing "I Believe I Can Fly" at midcourt, the Clippers rookie comfortably cleared the car's hood and took an alley-oop pass from teammate Baron Davis popping out of the sunroof.