Morning Edition; Calmus Choir

It's morning edition on 89KRPS. Performing later this week as part of the 2019-2020 Pittsburgh State Vocal and Chamber music series is the German Vocal Group, Kelmos. They have released 23 albums since first coming together in 1999 and will be visiting Southeast Kansas for the first time. On Friday at the Sharon Kay Dean Versailles Hall here at Pittsburgh State, the performance begins at 7.30 p.m. last week I spoke with the group's baritone voice Ludwig Bohmie. He's also a conductor, a lecturer, and an arranger. I first asked Ludwig to give us some history on how Kelmos joined together in 1999. Actually, Ellie, I'm the last founding member of the group who's still with the group today, and so I experienced all the 20 years and in those days of the very beginning we just finished school and we had been all members of the St. Thomas Boyzquire, you know that's the choir in Leipzig that was Johann Sebastian Bach, the director in the 18th century and

so you can imagine that we all grew up with vocal music and when the school finished the choir time finishes too and we just thought about doing something to continue singing and singing a part alone in a group that was a challenge and that was great fun and so we started rehearsing and started performing and we started as a hobby parallel to our studies in the university and we developed it to a main job and you can imagine when I'm listening to the CD, the best of 20 years, it's like a journey in time so you can hear the first recording from the year 2001 until the last recording from the year 2019 and there are certain things that developed but there are also certain things that remained over all this time, the way of

creating a sound, the way of making harmony together and things like that. You and Kalmus have traveled the world performing and meeting choral music lovers and I was wondering what are some of the venues and performances that you hold most valuable that you will never forget yourself? That's a difficult question. There are many great spaces we had the pleasure to perform in so speaking of the United States that would be the Carnegie Hall or the Lincoln Center

or the Metropolitan Museum in New York but it's also the big European cathedrals like St. Thomas Church in Leipzig in our hometown or the Philharmonie in Cologne and things like that. The famous performance halls, they are very impressive for us of course. Each concert is unique and even in the smallest village and they are very small villages for example in France with beautiful Gothic cathedrals, a concert will be a unique experience so over 20 years it's never boring. To stop here in Pittsburgh it's a part of a six city tour it'll conclude up in Topeka, Kansas on Saturday, January 25th and I was wondering what the group is going to perform or focus on during the US tour? Our program what we are going to sing is called Just Voices. It's a journey through the cars of vocal music so Kalmus we are all classical educated singers but we always laughed

to sing a great variety, to come across borders, to sing popper arrangements, to sing entertaining music as well as classical music and there are many things that we just arrange for our group and make it singable and the program we are going to perform in Kansas is a program which starts with the with the sacred classical music where we sing for example Schütz and Bach and then later on we sing some madrigals and we end in the second part with some pop arrangements. That was Lou Gwig-Bomy of Kalmus. The German vocal ensemble are performing this Friday night as part of the Pittsburgh State Chamber and solo music series at the Sharon K. Dean Roslidal Hall. The show starts at 730 to learn more about their performance and the group. Visit our news blog at krpsnews.com