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Advance price concert tickets may be purchased by calling (843) 444-5774. Full price tickets will also be available at the door one hour prior to each event. |
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"I consider Tim Koch one of the great choral conductors of our time."
- Samuel Adler, American composer, Juilliard School of Music
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Timothy Koch serves his tenth season as Music Director and Conductor of the Carolina Master Chorale in 2009-2010. His tenure has been marked by notable growth in artistic achievement, extensive touring, acclaimed performances of the masterworks for chorus and orchestra, opera productions, commissioning of numerous major new works, formation of the Carolina Youth Chorale, and expanded educational programming.
Koch has led the CMC in tour performances throughout Italy in 2003, and Denmark, Germany, and the Czech Republic in 2005, to New York’s Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in 2007, and throughout Spain in June 2008. In South Carolina, Koch and the CMC have presented acclaimed performances of Bach's St. John Passion, the Mozart and Brahms Requiems, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and Beethoven’s Mass in C. Koch has prepared the CMC for performances of Verdi’s Requiem and Stabat Mater, the Poulenc Gloria, Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw, and Orff’s Carmina Burana, among others. A 2008 performance of Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms with the Long Bay Symphony inspired Myrtle Beach Herald reviewer, William Hamilton to proclaim,
“The appropriately named Carolina Master Chorale is a treasure...”
Koch and the CMC embraced a new genre in 2006 with a full concert performance of Bizet’s beloved opera Carmen. The Chorale followed with a semi-staged production of Verdi’s La Traviata in May 2008. Following the Verdi performances, William Hamilton again wrote for the Herald,
“The remarkable Carolina Master Chorale….
(made) listeners completely unaware this is a volunteer group.…
and not a full time professional music ensemble.”
Koch and the CMC plan that the great opera repertory will now be regularly represented in future CMC season programming.
The CMC growth has also been marked by numerous successful collaborations. Koch has forged collaborative projects and relationships with the Long Bay Symphony and South Carolina Philharmonic Orchestras, conductors Charles Jones Evans, Nicholas Smith, Donald Neuen, Robert Page, David Rayl, André Thomas, and Eph Ehly, Viennese baritone, Benno Schollum, American soprano Shelley Jameson, and internationally renowned mezzo-soprano Kirstin Chàvez. In recent seasons, the CMC has shared talent and resources with Conway’s Theatre of the Republic, Litchfield Dance Arts, and the Myrtle Beach School of Performing Arts for a number of popular community projects.
Teamed with CMC Composer-in-Residence Andrew Fowler, Koch has presented nearly twenty premieres of important new works by the composer. In February 2007 members of the CMC participated in the world premiere of Fowler’s most important work to date, Directions for Singing, a 45-minute work for chorus, orchestra, narrator, and soprano and baritone soloists, at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, under the baton of world-renowned choral maestro, Eph Ehly. The opening concert of the 2008-2009 Season featured Fowler’s newest work, A Lover’s Day, Love Songs of Pablo Neruda. The 2009-2010 Season wirh spotlight an expanded version of Fowler's poignant Christmas oratorio, An Outbreak of Peace, and the world premieres of Five Love Songs, and Peace in the 21st Century. Koch and Fowler have conceived an opera on Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides which Fowler is composing for premiere some time in 2010 or 2011.
As founder/music director of the professional Carolina Chamber Chorale (also known as the Tim Koch Singers), Koch inspired widespread artistic achievement, including five commercial recordings on the Albany and Naxos/Milken Archive labels. His work with that ensemble has been lauded by...
Gramophone Magazine,
“a wonderful compendium of finely-judged performances,"
the Charleston Post and Courier,
“You have not heard anything like this. Ever."
and American Composer Samuel Adler,
“the finest professional choir in America."
Koch holds degrees from Illinois Wesleyan University and the University of Illinois and the Doctor of Musical Arts from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. He has taught on the faculties of the Eastman School of Music, Syracuse University, The University of Southern Mississippi, where in 1998 he was chosen as the sole USM recipient of the Mississippi legislature’s HEADWAE award, the University of South Carolina, the College of Charleston, and Illinois Wesleyan University, where he served as Visiting Director of Choral Activities in Spring 2009 . He is married to Grand Strand native and CMC member Jo Nell (Brown) Koch. He also serves the community as Music Director at First United Methodist Church, Myrtle Beach.
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Accompanist and Composer-in-Residence
Email: AndyFowler@sc.rr.com
Andrew Fowler, composer-in-residence and pianist for the Carolina Master Chorale, is a native of Myrtle Beach. He received the M.M. (music theory) and B.A. (piano performance) degrees from the University of South Carolina, and the Ph.D. (music theory) from the University of Texas at Austin. Fowler has served on the faculties of Auburn University at Montgomery, Cornell College, the University of North Texas, and the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught theory, history, and counterpoint. While at Auburn University at Montgomery and at Cornell College, he also served as Director of Choral Activities. He is currently Music Director at Trinity United Methodist Church in Conway, and also is Financial Development Coordinator for the Carolina Master Chorale.
Fowler’s Directions for Singing (for mixed chorus, soloists, and orchestra) received an enthusiastic world premiere at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center in February, 2007. Commissioned on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of Charles Wesley’s birth, the 55 minute work reflects Fowler’s interest in creating new ways of combining musical, theatrical, and narrative elements. His multi-media collaborative work Schul at Ulla (with visual artist Hugh Lifson) was performed at the Nobel Conference on Peace in 1999. His interest in state and local history has led to the creation of works such as the song cycle Mary Chestnut’s Diaries (for Soprano/Piano), Lowcountry Tales (for mixed chorus and piano) and Tales of the Kings Highway (premiered by the Long Bay Symphony Orchestra in February 2004), Over Yonder’s Ocean (2007: based upon original Murrells Inlet Spirituals), and Carolina On My Mind (2007), and Carolina Jazz Masters (2007). Fowler has composed for musical theater and stage venues, and regularly serves as music director and orchestrator for Conway’s Theater of the Republic. As a pianist, he has presented lecture/recital performances of masterworks by Liszt, Schumann, and others of the mid-nineteenth central European school at national music conferences. His articles on 19th century piano repertoire have appeared in various music journals. His choral works can be found in the catalogues of Abingdon, Augsburg, and Roger Dean Publishing, and his works are performed throughout the United States. Also, he is an avid interpreter of the 20th c. American jazz standards, and performs at various venues across the Grand Strand.
Fowler’s works written specifically for he Carolina Master Chorale include Dayspring (2001), Olde World Carols (2002), Antiphonal Noels (2003), Lowcountry Tales (2003), Christmas Carmina (2004), Songs of Travel (2005) and Wintertide (2005), An Outbreak of Peace (2006), Over Yonder’s Ocean (2007), Carolina On My Mind (2007), Carolina Jazz Masters (2007), A Sacred Harp Christmas (2007), as well as choral/instrumental arrangements of the Broadway tradition. This 2008-09 season’s first concert features another Fowler premiere titled A Lover’s Day: Poems of Pablo Neruda (for baritone solo, mixed chorus, and chamber orchestra). The holiday concert will reprise his Olde World Carols.
His wife, Scarlet, is lead teach and administrative supervisor for the Myrtle Beach Christian Academy High School. They enjoy any time shared with their children Nathan, Gwyn, Tiffany, Austin, and Dalton.
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Michael Neil Isaacson, Ph.D.
Guest Composer
Founding Music Director of The Israel Pops Orchestra, and the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music, Michael Isaacson enjoys a distinguished career as a composer, conductor, producer, and educator with over 500 Jewish and secular musical compositions published, including instrumental, vocal, sacred and secular arrangements, editions and educational works, the two volume, five hundred page Michael Isaacson Songbook, and over 40 produced CDs and album recordings. He is presently working on a book entitled: Jewish Music as Midrash.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, April 22, 1946, he received his early education at Yeshiva Rambam, and JamesMadison & SheepsheadBayHighSchools. After earning a Bachelor of Science in Music Education from Hunter College, a Master of Arts in Music Composition under Robert Starer from Brooklyn College, keyboard studies at the Juilliard School with John Mehegan, ethnomusicology with Israel Adler at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he went on to study with Samuel Adler and Warren Benson at the Eastman School of Music ultimately earning his Ph.D. there in Composition.
In 1973 Dr. Isaacson taught theory, composition, orchestration and conducted the Festival Chorus at SUNY Fredonia. In 1974 he was simultaneously appointed instructor at Case Western, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and Music Director of
Tifereth IsraelTemple in Cleveland, Ohio. There, at the request of Rabbi Daniel Silver, son of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, Isaacson composed new music each week for an alternative woodwind quintet and choir morning worship service exploring new modes of contemporary synagogue prayer and produced the Temple's first album of Jewish music The Loom and the Cloth. He met and married educator Susan Weisblatt and in 1976 moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in music for the media.
In Los Angeles, from 1976-1990, while fulfilling adjunct teaching positions at Loyola Marymount, Cal State-Long Beach, and UCLA, Dr. Isaacson composed and conducted original scores and arranged for many well known television series including John Williams & The Boston Pops with Joan Baez, Rich Man, Poor Man II, Little Women, Bionic Woman, Hawaii Five-0, Time Travelers, and the daytime dramas Loving and Days of Our Lives. As an arranger, orchestrator and conductor for feature films, he has had the pleasure of assisting composers John Williams, Alex North, Elmer Bernstein, Walter Scharf, and Charles Fox.
Dr. Isaacson has conducted, toured and produced new recordings of symphonic music with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Tel Aviv Symphony, the Munich Philharmonic, the Mexico City Philharmonic, the Vermont Symphony and Chorus, the Bulgarian National Symphony, and the Czech Chamber Orchestra. His recordings with The Hollywood Pops, which he also musically directs, may be heard on the Sony label.
Music albums composed, orchestrated and/or conducted for the Los Angeles Jewish community include: Regeneration and Legacy with Cantor Nathan Lam at Stephen S. Wise Temple, Guardians of the Heart, Hope For the Future and Kol Truah with Cantor Jay Frailich at University Synagogue, From Sinai to Sinai with Cantor Meir Finklestein at Sinai Temple, and Windows: The Songs of Rabbi Moshe Rothblum with Cantor David Silverstein, of Temple Adat Ariel.
When HebrewUnionCollege awarded Prime Minister of Israel Yitzchak Shamir an honorary doctorate in November 1991, Dr. Isaacson was selected as music director for the convocation and commissioned to compose a large musical work in Prime Minister Shamir's honor. The resulting dramatic work for men, and children's voices, brass and percussion is entitled Psalms for a Leader.
Michael Isaacson is the recipient of grants, honors and awards from The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Meet the Composer Inc., the Eastman School of Music, the Schubert Foundation, ASCAP, the American Conference of Cantors, Hebrew Union College and the Cantors Assembly's highest tribute for lifetime achievement in synagogue music; The Kavod Award.
Dr. and Mrs. Isaacson have been married for 31 years and have two sons; Lieutenant Ari Joel Isaacson, M.D. a Navy flight surgeon, and Andrew Jordan Isaacson, CEO of
AnswerMan Consulting; they live in Encino, CA.
Guest Narrator
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Mitch Laurance got his start in television as an Associate Director and Producer on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” He then went on to a career in front of the camera that has spanned more than twenty-five years. He was a series regular on HBO’s “Not Necessarily the News” and has had numerous recurring and guest-starring roles on shows such as “LA Law,” “Matlock” and “Dawson’s Creek.”  He most recently appeared on the FX Channel shows “The Riches,” starring Minnie Driver and Eddie Izzard, and “Prison Break,” and can be seen in the premier episode of the new Lifetime series “Drop Dead Diva.” He has also starred in numerous national commercials and infomercials.
Mitch has been the national Play-By-Play commentator for ESPN Championship Billiards for the past 15 years, and has served as the golf play-by-play commentator for Comcast Sports. He is the creator, producer and host of Myrtle Beach’s Award winning television show “On the Green Golf Video Showcase” and the host of “The Golf Road Show” on Comcast Sports TV, and for 5 years served as the Producer and Host of Entertainment for the National Senior Series Golf Tour.
Mitch has also served as Emcee for a variety of national corporate and charity events, as well as technical training films and instructional videos. His clients have included ZERO- The Project to End Prostate Cancer, UBS Warburg, The Billiard Congress of America, The Internal Revenue Service and The International Network of Golf, among others. He is a Charter Member of The Shivas Irons Society.
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