Winnipeg Free Press: IN FINE VOICE

Winnipeg Free Press
By: Alan Small
Photos by: Mikaela Mackenzie
Posted: 7:00 PM CST Friday, March. 3
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The 24-member Winnipeg Singers celebrate 50 years with past and present conductors

A HALF-CENTURY of sweet-sounding voices who have won awards around the world will receive well-earned bravos from a devoted audience Sunday.

The Winnipeg Singers will celebrate their 50th anniversary at the Crescent Arts Centre and offer musical highlights that have taken them from small school auditoriums in Manitoba all the way to Sagrada Familia, Antonio Gaudi’s famous basilica in Barcelona.

The concert will also welcome back conductors and singers from its rich past, including Bill Baerg, who founded the company in 1972, Mel Braun and Vic Pankratz, who teamed up to lead the Singers from 1995-99, as well as present-day maestro Yuri Klaz, who has conducted the 24-singer choir since 2003.

“I love Winnipeg Singers because it does a variety of different music. Some choirs focus on specific eras of music, but Winnipeg Singers does it all,” says Donnalynn Grills, an alto who joined the Winnipeg Singers in 1984 and is part of two other choirs in Winnipeg and a couple more elsewhere in Canada.

“We did a Halloween-themed concert where we even did some movement — we’re not known as a motion choir, that’s for sure — but we did Michael Jackson’s Thriller, all in costume.”

Baerg launched the Winnipeg Singers from the CBC Winnipeg Singers, who performed and recorded for the Crown radio network in the city.

When the contract ended, Baerg dropped the CBC tag of the name and started a professional choir, the only one in Winnipeg at the time.

“He had all these amazing singers, so he said, ‘Let’s start our own thing,’ and that’s how Winnipeg Singers started 50 years ago,” Pankratz says.

WHILE many of the Singers then were also performers on the CBC television show Hymn Sing, there was no formal connection between the two groups, says Pankratz, a Hymn Sing alumnus who began his singing career with the Singers under the direction of Baerg and his successor, John Martens.

“Both of them were inspiring and I learned so much from both of them about what it means to be a professional singer,” says Pankratz, who would turn his voice into a career, performing concerts across Canada, many with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and about 20 productions with Manitoba Opera. He now heads the choral department at Westgate Mennonite Collegiate.

Baerg, 85, will conduct the choir he led from 1973-83 on songs it performed in those early years, such as Beati Quorum by Anglo-Irish composer Charles Stanford.