Chorus

Annapolis Chorale subscribers in recent months had appealed to music director J. Ernest Green with one common request: more chorale. Not to suggest anything unkind about the capable Annapolis Chamber Orchestra, which typically accompanies the chorale, or the fine array of soloists recently featured, but chorus singing is what some fans craved. Green e-mailed them back before Saturday's concert to promise exactly that in a program "all about singing." Music for the Heart did indeed delight the near-capacity audience at St. Anne's Episcopal Church on Saturday, while providing solace for the soul.

On a recent blustery night, members of the Baltimore Choral Arts Society gather in a church hall in Homeland to rehearse Rachmaninoff's All Night Vigil, a piece based on the Russian Orthodox liturgy and written in Church Slavonic. Conductor Tom Hall leads the singers from behind a grand piano as they prepare for tomorrow's concert at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. To his right is a visitor, clad in black cassock, a silver crucifix on a chain around his neck, with a long, brown beard.

The Arundel Vocal Arts Society has engaged a sterling new musical director to preside over the local chorus' silver anniversary season of two concerts. Having returned last month from working with the Fairbanks Alaska Summer Arts Festival, JoAnn Kulesza will concurrently serve as music director of AVAS and the Peabody Opera Program, where she will conduct Benjamin Britten's 1954 psychodrama Turn of the Screw in November. She also directs two choirs at Eastport United Methodist Church and has also been engaged to conduct Jacques Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld in April for Opera Vivente in Baltimore.

The woman who started the Billie Holiday Vocal Competition 15 years ago prefers to call the event a concert that offers a lifeline to fledgling performers willing to share their talents. "These performers are not in competition, but in concert with each other," said Ruby Glover, judge at the last 14 events and honoree yesterday. "They are sharing fascinating talent with this audience and hoping to take the next step in their careers." In front of a packed house at Center Stage yesterday, Mayor Martin O'Malley awarded the first-place $1,500 prize to Sara Jones, an Army staff sergeant who belted out a bossa nova in Portuguese.

After 32 years of service, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Chorus will be disbanded at the end of the current season. BSO President John Gidwitz broke the news to the singers yesterday afternoon at a rehearsal for next week's program, which is to feature the 147-member chorus. "It was dropped like a bomb," said chorus manager Cheryl Kauffman of the decision. "People reacted very emotionally. Doctors and lawyers, housewives and schoolteachers were in tears. Everyone wanted to find a way to make this not happen."

These days, when director Irene Lewis talks to actor Robert Dorfman, she's really talking to five people.And they are five very different people -- different occupations, different social classes, even different genders.What ties them together is that they are characters in Lewis' production of "Romeo and Juliet" -- which opens Wednesday at Center Stage -- and that they share a purpose the director describes as "choral witness."This idea came about because Lewis was intrigued by the play's opening speech, in which the classically inspired character of the Chorus gives away the plot, right down to the crux of the matter: "A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their lives."

It is after 9 on a Thursday night and 15 or 20 men, working men in denims and corduroys, sweats and double-knits worn as thin as can be, join hands in a circle and sway to the rhythm of a guitar riff.Eyes closed, they hum with the chord changes, then break into a minor-key version of "What a Friend We Have in Jesus." Joseph E. Kirkland, chaplain of the Johnson Male Chorus, slips in a side door of the Asbury Towne Neck United Methodist Church and begins the prayer. His voiceis barely audible, but the choir members respond, repeating each phrase in gospel harmonies.

Singing George Frederick Handel's glorious "Hallelujah chorus has become a joyous tradition at South Carroll High School's annual Holiday Concert each December.This custom will continue on Tuesday evening, when former members of South Carroll's chorus are invited from the audience to sing in heavenly harmony with this year's chorus.Kevin King, who has been vocal music teacher at South Carroll since 1982, invites all of his former students to attend the 7:30 p.m. concert, as well as students of former South Carroll chorus directors Peggy Leatherwood Brengle, Ross Merryman and Florence Koepple.

Twenty-seven years ago, Jack Watters was in Security Square Mall in Woodlawn waiting for his wife when he heard harmonizing voices singing barbershop music. The Heart of Maryland Chorus was practicing in a meeting room for a performance at the mall, and Watters - always intrigued by the a cappella music style - joined in. The group then invited him to perform with them. He agreed, forgetting about his wife, Rusty. "I'm in the middle of this group singing, when my wife looks up and sees me," said Watters, of Sykesville.

Among unlikely success stories in music, consider this one. The music director of a church in Orlando, Fla., visits Kiev in Ukraine in 1992 to conduct the first Handel's "Messiah" performance there since the fall of the Soviet Union. He likes the experience so much that he decides to pack up his family in Florida the next year and move to Kiev, where he creates an orchestra of 60 and a chorus of 115. While he's at it, he also founds a church and gets ordained as its pastor. The orchestra and chorus flourish in Ukraine, performing sacred classics - Bach's B minor Mass, requiems by Brahms and Faure, etc. - that had been banned by the communists, as well as standard repertoire.