Great Hall Choral Arts Festival - "Engage, Enrich, Expand"

Bethel's 5th Annual Great Hall Choral Arts Festival entitled, “Engage, Enrich, Expand” welcomes Saunder Choi as guest conductor and clinician. The festival culminates with an evening concert featuring individual performances by choirs from St. Michael-Albertville High School, Irondale High School, and the Bethel Choir directed by Dr. Merrin Guice Gill. Selections composed by Choi will be performed by each ensemble and the program will conclude with a joint work performed by all the choirs conducted by the composer.

Please join us for a pre-concert lecture given by Choi on Southeast Asian Choral Music at 7 p.m.

Saunder Choi is a Los Angeles-based Filipino composer and choral artist. His works have also been performed by the Philippine Madrigal Singers, the Crossing Choir, the LA Master Chorale Chamber Singers, Sacra Profana, Tonality, Indianapolis Symphonic Choir, World Youth Choir, Asia Pacific Youth Choir and many others. He won the 2017 Indianapolis Symphonic Choir Carol Commission competition and awarded the 1st prize in the 2014 American Prize for Choral Composition (student division). He was also a finalist for the 2012 and 2015 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and was one of the five composition fellows at the 2016 Big Sky Choral Initiative, where he worked with the Grammy-award winning choir, The Crossing. 

As a tenor, he maintains an active singing schedule in Southern California. He regularly sings with the L.A. Choral Lab, Pacific Chorale, Horizon Chamber Choir, C3LA: Contemporary Choral Collective of Los Angeles, the Hex Ensemble and Tonality. He serves as teaching artist for the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s Voices Within and Oratorio Project. As a SAG-AFTRA session singer, he sang in the soundtrack of Disney’s The Lion King (2019) live action remake, Disney’s Mulan (2020) live action remake, The Call of the Wild (2020), and others. He is currently Director of Music at Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.

Born in Manila, Philippines, Saunder holds degrees from De La Salle University – Manila, Berklee College of Music, and the USC Thornton School of Music. 

Choi's full bio can be found on his website.