Join 10-time Grammy Award winner and legendary jazz and classical musician Arturo Sandoval as he performs with a popular local children’s choir and Notre Dame student musicians to bring a family-friendly and festive concert in the holiday tradition to families and visitors in the greater South Bend-Elkhart area just a week after Autumn begins. The show, Christmas with Arturo Sandoval and the Notre Dame Children’s Choir: Album Release Concert, takes place on a Notre Dame home game Football Friday, September 28 at 8 p.m. in the DeBartolo Performing Art Center’s Leighton Concert Hall.
The concert celebrates the release of the new CD Arturo Sandoval’s Christmas at Notre Dame, recorded in 2017 in the Leighton Concert Hall, with the Notre Dame Children’s Choir, Notre Dame Symphonic Winds, and the Notre Dame Jazz Ensemble—all ensembles performing as part of this unique concert experience. Each ticket purchase includes the newly produced CD as a pre-order.
The Notre Dame Children’s Choir began as a twenty-voice ensemble in the fall of 2013 and has grown to over 200 singers in 11 choirs for children as young as infants and toddlers and as old as high school students. They now offer a Liturgical Choir that also leads music for mass and vespers at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart and Saint Mary’s College Church of Our Lady of Loretto. The 2018–2019 year offers singers exciting opportunities to travel to Los Angeles, Texas, the Indiana Music Educators’ Convention in Fort Wayne, and Leeds, UK, as well as perform with world-renowned guests such as Sandoval and the gospel artist and composer Mark Miller.
All under the umbrella of the Notre Dame Band, the Symphonic Winds are one of the three concert bands bringing out Sandoval’s classically-trained musicianship as a composer and performer, while the big-band-style Jazz Ensemble also ties the University’s proud history in jazz music to the Cuban-born Sandoval who was a protégé of the legendary jazz master Dizzy Gillespie.
One of the best parts of this concert is that area children can work with world-class professional musicians. Concertgoers will have the chance to see that painstaking process themselves via a preview of a documentary filmed during the making of Arturo Sandoval’s Christmas at Notre Dame. The concert and CD combine sacred and secular music reflective of the holiday season.
Sandoval was born in Artemisa, a small town in the outskirts of Havana, Cuba, on November 6, 1949, just two years after Gillespie became the first musician to bring Latin influences into American Jazz. Sandoval began studying classical trumpet at the age of twelve, but it didn’t take him long to catch the excitement of the jazz world. He has since evolved into one of the world’s most acknowledged guardians of jazz trumpet and flugelhorn, as well as a renowned classical artist, pianist, and composer. He received the 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom and an honorary doctorate in fine arts from the University of Notre Dame in 2016.
