COLUMBIA, Ky. – This year’s Lindsey Wilson College Singers’ Home Concert will include two pieces of nostalgia.
The Spring ’25 Tour Home Concert – which will be at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 12, at Columbia Baptist Church, 210 Greensburg St. – will be the final Home Concert directed by Gerald Chafin, who has led the Lindsey Wilson Singers for more than a quarter-century.
The concert is free and open to the public.
The performance will feature a diverse variety of sacred music from the last 500 years, including a musical selection that Chafin rewrote and conducted more than two decades ago at Lindsey Wilson. The piece, “Gloria Patri,” from Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli, was performed at the inauguration of Lindsey Wilson President William T. Luckey Jr., who has been the college’s eighth president since 1998.
The March 12 concert will come after the Lindsey Wilson Singers’ spring tour in Southern California during the college’s spring break. This year’s spring tour will include performances by the 29-student musical ensemble at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, a homeless shelter in Los Angeles and at the iconic Griffith Observatory.
The spring tour has been a Singers tradition since the 1997-98 school year, with the exception of 2020-21 when it was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over that period, the choral group has performed in a total of 42 U.S. states and seven countries; every year but 2021.
“A Lindsey Wilson Singers tour is educationally enhancing, relationally rewarding and spiritually sustaining,” said Chafin, who is a music professor and the college’s director of choral programs.
This year’s spring tour will also be a kind of reunion for the Singers when on March 2 they will meet with the choral group from El Segundo High School. The Singers and the high school choral group met last summer when both ensembles performed at the St. Patrick Choral Festival in Dublin, Ireland.
“We enjoyed interacting with their students and talking with parents who had made the trip,” said Chafin. “After several conversations, we decided that since the Singers were coming to California this spring, we could arrange a day to be together and create a choral music collaboration. Since that conversation, we have arranged for this grand event to happen!”
After the Spring ’25 Tour Home Concert, the Lindsey Wilson Singers will begin work on their annual gala concert, which will also include Singers alumni. The concert will be on Sunday, April 13, the anniversary of the first performance of Handel’s Messiah which was in Dublin, Ireland.
“I love it when a plan comes together!” said Chafin.
Photo: LWC SINGERS 2025 – The Lindsey Wilson College Singers’ Spring ’25 Tour Home Concert will be at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 12, at Columbia Baptist Church, 210 Greensburg St. It will be the final Home Concert directed by Gerald Chafin, who has led the Lindsey Wilson Singers for more than a quarter-century.
(Duane Bonifer – Lindsey Wilson College)