This Black History Month, Coro Allegro, Boston’s LGBTQ+ and allied classical chorus, and Artistic Director David Hodgkins present IDENTITY: I Believe, a program celebrating works by Black American composers and their impact on American music, in concert with four acclaimed Black LGBTQ+ and allied artists, as part of the chorus’s season-long exploration of identity.

Coro Allegro will be joined by Grammy Nominee Reginald Mobley, countertenor, renowned for his “shimmering voice” [BachTrack] and will present him with the 15th Annual Daniel Pinkham Award, created in honor of the late Boston LGBTQ+ composer, for his advocacy for arts equity and contributions to classical music and the LGBTQ+ and allied community. We are also thrilled to introduce Boston audiences to ground-breaking trans soprano Breanna Sinclairé, named a hero by OUT magazine and a “Shining Star” [DC Theatre Arts], and to welcome back Philip Lima, baritone, lauded for his “glorious” singing [Boston Globe], and David Freeman Coleman, piano, praised for his “stirring renditions” of spirituals [Dig Boston].

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“Especially do I believe in the Negro Race; In the beauty of its genius, the sweetness of its soul.”
—W.E.B. Du Bois Credo, as set by Margaret Bonds

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The concert begins and ends with two classical works written by trailblazing Black American composers at either end of the Civil Rights movement, William Grant Still’s A Psalm for the Living (1954) and Margaret Bonds’ Credo (1965-7), set to the iconic 1904 prose of the same name by an earlier civil rights icon, W. E. B. Du Bois. Though drawn from the language of the past, this is prophetic writing that speaks to the conflicts of our own time, calling out not only racism, but also war and colonialism, while powerfully affirming the common humanity of all nations and the belief that all people, "black and brown and white, are brothers."

At the heart of the program are African American spirituals, the Sorrow Songs, Jubilee songs, and work songs that came out of slavery in America, which together  as Reginald Mobley observes, "became the backbone of the Black American contribution to culture in America" and the foundation of so much American music. Coro Allegro and guest artists will perform arrangements of spirituals by some of the leading figures who preserved them—Harry T. Burleigh, the dean of the concert spiritual, composer-conductor Jester Hairston, J. Rosamund Johnson, composer of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” as well as a contemporary arrangement by Seraphic Fire conductor Patrick Dupre Quigley with Reginald Mobley. The audience will also hear gospel works by Horace Clarence Boyer, Thomas A. Dorsey, and M. Roger Holland II, as well as an art song, “Jean,” composed by Harry T. Burleigh, chosen by Mr. Mobley, "because it is also important to recognize that Black Americans are not just pain and reflections of pain. We are also reflections of beauty and joy and just music and art and beauty for its own sake.”

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Made possible in part by grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Boston Cultural Council, and The Equality Fund of The Boston Foundation.  Coro Allegro welcomes as Community Partners, Nuestra Comunidad,  the Network for Arts Administrators of Color (NAACBoston) and the Mass Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC).