Joseph Huszti is Professor Emeritus of Music in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. His tenure at UC Irvine included twenty-seven international concert tours featuring numerous prize-winning performances at the International Musical Eisteddfod, Llangollen, Wales (1979, 1986, 1992, 1997, 2008, 2017), Béla Bartók International Choral Competition, Debrecen, Hungary (1988, 1994, 2000), the Koorfest, den Haag, Holland (1979), World Choir Games (2006, 2010) and Bratislava, Slovakia (2014). The University of California, Irvine choirs under his direction have performed concerts in the cathedrals of York, Sterling, Westminster, Coventry, Canterbury, Ely, Burgos, Liverpool and Boston as well as presenting formal concerts in London, Tokyo, Burgos, Shanghei, Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei, Budapest, Warsaw, Prague, and Vienna.
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Before coming to California, Huszti headed the choral activities at Boston University’s School for the Arts and directed the Young Vocalists Program from 1972-1977 in Lenox, Massachusetts at the Tanglewood Festival. He collaborated with internationally renowned musicians including Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland and Norman Dello Joio. 

Professor Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, Anna Hamre serves as Artistic Director of the Fresno Community Chorus, where she conducts the Master Chorale, Coro Piccolo, and Coro Solare. While each ensemble mounts its own performances, the Master Chorale frequently collaborates with the Fresno Philharmonic Orchestra.

Dr. Hamre took over the Fresno Community Chorus in 2002. With the collaborative leadership of an active board, the large ensemble Master Chorale has become the premier symphonic chorus in the Fresno area. In recent years, multiple performances of the Master Chorale have been included by the Fresno Bee in “Top Cultural Arts Events” in the Fresno area. The chamber ensemble Coro Piccolo is most noted for its holiday performances at St. Anne’s Chapel. In 2016, FCC, Inc. added to its organization a new classical choir, Coro Solare, which is designed to rehearse and perform only during daylight hours. The treble-voice ensemble Coro Vox Aeterna was created to perform on the CD Mother of Light, featuring international star Isabel Bayrakdarian, released in 2016.

RODNEY EICHENBERGER, Professor of Choral Music, teaches graduate choral conducting, choral techniques, and conducting pedagogy. He has lectured and guest conducted extensively throughout the United States and abroad. Professor Eichenberger is the program coordinator for the choral conducting division of International Workshops with recent summer seminars held in Biarritz and Lyon, France; Stavanger, Norway; Glasgow, Scotland and Graz, Austria. His instructional video on choral conducting with André Thomas, “What They See Is What You Get,” released in 1994 by Hinshaw Music Company, is now in its ninth printing.

​For the past 25 years, he has been an active participant in choral music education in Australia and New Zealand. He has guest conducted and lectured at the Swedish Choral Directors Association Convention in Orebro, Sweden, presented sessions at the Third World Symposium of Choral Music in Vancouver, British Columbia, and presented workshops at “Buenos Aires Sings,” the First International School and Youth Choral Festival in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Vance George is recognized internationally as one of America’s leading choral conductors. Under his direction he and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus have been hailed as one of the finest in the world and have received four Grammys and an Emmy.

His unique range of musical styles, knowledge of languages, mastery of vocal colors, and synthesis of the choral-orchestral tradition has been lauded by audiences, critics, and conductors. His work embodies the legacy of the great maestros and mentors he has known as protégé and colleague, especially Robert Shaw, Margaret Hillis, Robert Page, Otto Werner-Mueller, Mary Oyer and Kurt Masur, John Nelson, Helmut Rilling, Edo de Waart, Herbert Blomstedt and Michael Tilson Thomas.
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For more than 23 years he prepared and conducted the SFS Chorus and SF Symphony in performances of large choral/orchestral repertoire as well as seasonal and pops concerts.

Linda Lovaas received her B.M.E. and M.Ed. in music from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, and began her teaching career in 1977 at Levi Fry Middle School in Texas City, Texas. She retired in 2008 after 18 years directing the choruses and drama teams at Mark Twain Junior High School in Modesto, California.

She was selected 2002-2003 Region VI Teacher of Excellence for the California League of Middle Schools and also Teacher of the Month for Channel 10 News in 2003.

Linda has been a guest conductor for various junior high honor choirs in the state. She has given sessions at CMEA and California ACDA (now CCDA) conferences, and has worked as a clinician with teachers and students at many school sites. She has served on the California ACDA Board as Junior High/Middle School Repertoire & Standards Chair, and as Chair of the Summer Conference at ECCO. She was manager for the Junior High Honor Choir at the ACDA Western Division Conference in Anaheim (2008), Reno (2012), and Santa Barbara (2014).
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Linda loves spending time with her husband, Duane, and going on adventures in their 1975 French powder blue TR6. She has taken up tap dancing again after a 50 year hiatus, and recently danced as a popcorn box on the Modesto Junior College stage at her studio’s recital! She volunteers and is on the board for Modesto’s Salvation Army Women’s Auxiliary. She loves making quilts, reading good books, and watching movies of all kinds!

John Alexander is one of America’s most respected choral conductors. His inspired leadership both on the podium and as an advocate for the advancement of the choral art has generated international respect and acclaim.

His long and distinguished career has encompassed conducting hundreds of choral and orchestral performances in 27 countries around the globe. Alexander is not only recognized for his exceptional talent in bringing the masterworks to life, but is also eminent as a strong proponent of contemporary American music. He regularly programs works by American composers, and has presented many premieres of their works. Recent seasons have seen Alexander conduct the world or West Coast premieres of Jake Heggie’s The Radio Hour, Frank Ticheli’s The Shore, the choral version of David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion, Thierry Escaich’s Trois Motets, and David Del Tredici’s Paul Revere’s Ride, as well as pieces by emerging young composers through Pacific Chorale’s Young Composers Competition. Previous premieres have included performances of works by John Adams, Dominick Argento, Luis Bacalov, Howard Hanson, James Hopkins, Morten Lauridsen, Stephen Paulus, Frank Ticheli and Eric Whitacre.

Dr. Ronald Kean, Emeritus Professor of Music at Bakersfield College, recently retired after completing his 30th year of teaching in California. His DMA degree is from the University of Southern California where his conducting teachers were Rodney Eichenberger, James Vail, and Daniel Lewis as apprentice conductor of the USC Symphony. Prior to his advanced degrees, Ron was invited to be a copyist for the late Robert Shaw and sang in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus and Chamber Chorus. He studied west African drumming from Ghanaian master drummer Samuel Kwaku Daddy and Latin percussion with Marcos Reyes from the renowned group, “War.” 

His teaching opportunities included choral music and world music, which he taught for the past 26 years in the Kern Community College District. Prior experience includes four years as a high school choral music teacher in southern California. He was awarded the 2012-2013 Bakersfield College Distinguished Teaching Award by his colleagues. 

William Dehning retired in 2007 after fifteen years as Chairman and Professor of Choral Music at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, where he conducted the USC Chamber Choir and taught choral conducting.  For twenty years prior to his appointment to USC, Dehning was Director of Choirs at the University of the Pacific, where he was recipient of the university’s Distinguished Professor Award and its Commencement speaker in 1991, and where he was honored by the alumni for his years of service.  Under his leadership, the Thornton Chamber Choir won seven prizes in international European competitions and the ensemble also appeared to standing ovations at six ACDA conventions. 

From 1985-1995 he was the founder-conductor of the California Choral Company, a professional-caliber chamber chorus that attained a fine reputation in Europe as well as in the U.S., where its performance was a highlight of the 1991 ACDA National Convention.

Albert McNeil is a native Californian — born in Los Angeles. He earned Bachelor and Master degrees at the University of California, Los Angeles, and did his doctoral studies at the University of Southern California, the Westminster Choir College of Princeton, and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He is presently Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of California at Davis, where he was Director of Choral Activities for 21 years and headed the Music Education Program. Simultaneous with the Davis period, he taught Ethnomusicology at the University of Southern California for 12 years. Prior to his University teaching, McNeil taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District for 17 years beginning at the elementary level and including junior highs, and ended his tenure in the district at the Susan Miller Dorsey High School where he headed a multi-school program known as APEX, Area Project for Educational Exchange involving five High Schools in a unique federally funded experimental program with each high school specializing in unique course offerings.

Richard Messenger is a graduate of Hastings College (Nebraska) and did graduate work at the University of Iowa and at California State University, Fullerton. He taught at the high school and community college level in Iowa for seven years before moving to California in 1976 to study with Howard Swan at CSUF. In addition to Dr. Swan, he counts as mentors Daniel Moe, Deral Johnson, Weston Noble, and John Alexander. He is retired from the position of Choral Music Director at Irvine High School (Irvine, CA) where he taught from 1977 – 2010. He has served as an adjunct professor of music at California State University at Long Beach and at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa. In 2000, he became the Director of Music at St. Mark Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach. 

Under his direction, the Irvine High School Chorale performed in festival choirs at Carnegie Hall in 1995, 1999, 2005, and in 2009. In the 2005 appearance, they were selected to give the featured choir performance at which the choir premiered “And the Night Shall Be Filled With Music”, written for them by composer Peter Boyer. The IHS Chorale was invited to return to give the featured choir performance at a festival at Carnegie Hall in 2009. In the summer of 2003, the Chorale accepted an invitation to perform the music of Eric Whitacre in Berlin, performing under the composer’s direction. Irvine High School choirs appeared onstage with Pacific Symphony Orchestra at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on numerous occasions.