Auditions
Audition Dates Auditions for The Phoenix Symphony Chorus will be held in late spring or early fall of 2010.
Audition Requirements Men and women over the age of 17 with familiarity with musical notation are invited to audition. Candidates will be asked to perform a prepared solo piece.
Contact For more information or to set up an audition, please email tpsc06@gmail.com.
TPS Chorus Member Handbook and Roster To download a copy of the 2009-10 TPS Chorus Calendar, click here (PDF). To download a copy of the Member Handbook, click here (pdf).
About the Chorus
The Phoenix Symphony Chorus is led by Dr. Gregory Gentry and Assistant Director In-Hwan Choi. Founded in 2001, the Chorus serves as a professional-level performing partner for Arizona's only full-time orchestra. The Chorus is comprised of over 100 volunteers and is governed by its own members in partnership with the Chorusmaster and Symphony staff. Chorus members collectively donate more than 12,000 hours of service to music and the Symphony each year.
Rehearsals are held on Monday nights (7:00 - 9:30 p.m.) at Central United Methodist Church (1875 N Central Ave in Phoenix).
About the Staff
Gregory R. Gentry returns for his fourth season (2009-2010) as Chorus Master of The Phoenix Symphony.
Under Dr. Gentry’s leadership, the Phoenix Symphony Chorus has grown in size and successfully taken on extraordinarily challenging new repertoire, including Grey’s Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio, Golijov’s Ainadamar, and Adam’s Nixon in China. The February 2008 world premiere of Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio was followed by the Phoenix Symphony Chorus reprising their work with the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra in July 2008, punctuated by the March 2009 Naxos commercial recording release of the work. In versatile contrast, select members of the Phoenix Symphony Chorus performed to sold-out audiences for the May 2009 concert A Salute to Rodgers & Hammerstein.
February 2009 marked Dr. Gentry’s Phoenix Symphony conducting debut, with Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. He appeared at Carnegie Hall for the second time in June 2008, to conduct Schubert’s Mass in G, and will return to Carnegie Hall to conduct Mozart’s Coronation Mass in 2010, and Avery Fisher Hall in 2011. His conducting technique has been guided by studies with Eph Ehly and George Lynn, as well as additional work with Brian Priestman, Dale Warland, and Gary Hill. Both a singer and percussionist, Dr. Gentry has performed under the baton of Dave Brubeck, Aaron Copland, Karel Husa, Jorge Mester and Robert Shaw.
Dr. Gentry has worked in many facets of choral research and conducting. His edition of "Dnes Hhristos" (Musica Russica, 2009), Vasilii Titov's Seventeenth-Century Moscow Baroque Liturgical Choral Concerto for 12 voices—premiered in Russian by the Oregon Repertory Singers in 2001—is the first-ever published Western edition of this work. His edition of Jean Philippe Rameau's "Cor meum et caro mea" from Quam dilecta tabernacula premiered in February 2005 at the American Choral Directors Association national convention in Los Angeles.
Among many professional organizations, Dr. Gentry is an active member of the American Choral Directors Association, Chorus America, the National Association for Music Education, and the National Collegiate Choral Organization. He is President-Elect of the Arizona Choral Directors Association, and the founding director of Southwestern Liederkranz,
Dr. Gentry is the newly appointed Director of Choral Performance at the Arizona State University School of Music, with the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. In this capacity, at ASU, he conducts the Symphonic Chorale, teaches graduate and undergraduate conducting and literature, and administers the doctoral, masters and undergraduate choral conducting program (which includes over 300 students engaged in choral music). Fall 2009 will mark the return of the ASU choral program’s collaboration with the Phoenix Symphony and Chorus, with John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls.
Dr. Gentry earned his doctorate from the Conservatory of Music at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
In-Hwan Choi joins the Phoenix Symphony Chorus in 2009/10 as the Assistant Chorus Master. He is a native of Seoul, South Korea, and received his undergraduate degree from Seoul National University in voice performance. After immigrating to the United States, he studied at the University of California-Los Angeles and Manhattan School of Music, where he completed his masters degree in opera performance. His operatic performance credits include Handel’s Esther, Menotti’s The Medium, and Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, as well as Beethoven’s Christ of Mt. Olives, Mendelssohn’s St. Paul, and Mozart’s Coronation Mass.
With a conscious decision to focus on conducting, Mr. Choi then received his masters degree (with Distinction) from Westminster Choir College (in Princeton, NJ) in choral conducting and church music. During this time he was the recipient of the Hinshaw Memorial Award, the Ethel and Shirley Morgan Scholarship, the Frederick M. Thayer, Jr. Memorial Scholarship, and the James E. Thomson Graduate Scholarship. His experience has included singing under the baton of Kurt Mazur, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Zdenek Macal, Joseph Flummerfelt, and Michael Christie.
As a conductor, Mr. Choi has studied with Joseph Flummerfelt, James Jordan, Andrew Megill, Gary Hill, and Gregory Gentry. In 2007 his own work as the conductor of the Korean-American Boys and Girls Choir at the Los Angeles Music Center was broadcast on PBS. Mr. Choi is currently pursuing the degree Doctor of Musical Arts in choral conducting at the Arizona State University School of Music.