9/11 Remembered

Long Beach Camerata Singer Roster

Tammi Alderman, Associate Conductor

Tammi Alderman is Director of Choral and Vocal Music at Temple City Unified School District, Associate Conductor for the Long Beach Camerata Singers and an adjunct music education faculty member for the School of Music at CSU Fullerton. She directs the choral program at Arrowbear Summer Music Camp and is on staff for the Choral Camp through the Pacific Chorale and CSU Fullerton. She is frequently called upon as a professional chorister, adjudicator, guest conductor and clinician for choral sessions and festivals throughout the Southwest.

Ms. Alderman has taught elementary, middle school, high school and college choirs in California and Colorado for nearly two decades. Her classroom teaching focuses on community building within the ensemble utilizing both traditional and unconventional rehearsal spaces and practices. She regularly mentors collegiate pre-service teachers as well as providing a program for beginning high school conductors. Her choirs consistently receive the highest ratings in festivals and competitions, locally and nationwide. Choirs under Ms. Alderman’s direction have toured extensively through the United States, Eastern and Western Europe, Canada, and China. Students from her choirs have been selected as members of honor choirs at regional, state, divisional and national levels in every year of her teaching.

For the last sixteen years Ms. Alderman has been an active member and served on the boards of the Southern California Vocal Association (currently serving as President-Elect) and California Choral Directors Association (most recently serving as Chair of Community and Professional Choruses). Additionally, she hosts yearly honor choir auditions at her school site and serves as an adjudicator for High School and Middle School/Junior High SCVA Choir Festivals.

Soon to be Dr. Alderman is working on the completion of her dissertation through the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music. Her writing is on methods for pairing of appropriate junior high and high school choral repertoire to the musicianship level of the ensemble.

Dr. Stephen Karr, Accompanist

Born in Greenville, South Carolina, Dr. Stephen Karr is a compelling interpreter of opera and orchestral works. He has worked with companies across the US, including Des Moines Metro Opera’s OPERA Iowa tour, the Glimmerglass Festival, Opera New Jersey and Palm Beach Opera. His international appearances include the Royal Opera House in Muscat, Oman an appointment as Cultural Envoy from the United States Department of State to Rotterdam. He is currently the Artistic Administrator at Long Beach Opera, for which he conducts Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse in March at the new IMAX theater at the Aquarium of the Pacific, and Robert X. Rodriguez’s Frida in June. He makes his guest conducting debut at Anchorage Opera with the latter work in February.

In 2011, Stephen co-founded Pacific Opera Project, for which he served as music director until 2016. With POP, he led productions of Trouble in Tahiti, Così fan tutte, The Turn of the Screw, La Calisto (Los Angeles premiere), Ariadne auf Naxos and The Rake’s Progress, among others. The Los Angeles Times praised his leadership of the Stravinsky as having kept orchestra, cast and chorus on “well-articulated rhythmic track.”

Stephen’s repertoire spans nearly the entire history of opera, as well as significant masterpieces of the orchestral repertoire. He has taught at Chapman University, Michigan State University, USC and UCLA. His schooling includes degrees in organ from Mercer University and Westminster Choir College, as well as a Master’s degree in conducting from UCLA, where he anticipates completing a doctorate in 2020, studying with Neal Stulberg. He lives in Long Beach, California with his wife, Hannah Waldman and their children Leonard and Eleanor.

Long Beach Camerata Singers

Long Beach Camerata Singers was founded in 1966 by Frank Allen as the Vocal Arts Ensemble and served as the resident chorus for the Long Beach Bach Festival, which he founded in 1973. In 1983, Dr. David Wilson, a professor of choral music at USC, succeeded Frank Allen and led the choir for over twenty years, expanding the Camerata Singers’ repertoire and changing its name. Under his baton, the chorus first toured Europe in 1999. In 2005, CSULB choral director Dr. Jonathan Talberg was appointed artistic director. He added a core of professional singers to the ranks and led a second European tour in 2006. From 2009 to 2017 Dr. Robert Istad, director of choral studies at CSU Fullerton, led the choir as its artistic director, expanding the auditioned ensemble to 90 voices and raising the group to the professional level for which it is known today. The 2021-22 season marks the fifth season of the choir’s current artistic director, Dr. James K. Bass, Professor of Choral Studies at UCLA and Associate Conductor of the professional chamber choir Seraphic Fire.

Currently in its 56th season, the Long Beach Camerata Singers offers the Peace Project in the fall, two performances of Handel’s Messiah, and a June concert of song classics, as well as producing and headlining the new ChoralFest Long Beach, an expansion of the venerable Long Beach Bach Festival.
In 2015, the choir established an artistic partnership with the Long Beach Symphony as its official chorus. Long Beach Camerata Singers also performs regularly with other arts organizations, including Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra, the Pacific Symphony, the Long Beach Opera, Long Beach Youth Chorus, and the South Bay Children’s Chorale.

LBCS offers two education programs: the Camerata Kinder Konzerts, provides interactive learning experiences focused on the vocal arts for 2 to 5 year old children that are performed at Young Horizons Child Development Centers. The Peace4Youth series brings the Peace Project into Long Beach Middle Schools.

LBCS Board of Directors

Officers:
Patricia Petersen Camp, Board Chair
Jan B. Hower, President
JC Edwards, Treasurer
Sandra Holden, Secretary

Members at Large:
Dee Abrahamse
David Bunker
Arlyss Burkett
Bill Duch
Marianne Gastelum
Myra Hillburg
Dorothy Jacobi
Meredith Lee
Rebecca Low
Dick Lunde
Evelyn Meacham
Steven Nottingham
Carl Porter
Herb Schraibman
Barbara Tressel

LBCS Administrative Staff
Josh Bishop, Operations
Heather Chambers, Accountant
Joelle Kim, Director of Education
Grace Martino, Executive Assistant
Taylor Presnall, Administrator

Thank You to Our Sponsors

Janice Hahn
Supervisor, 4th District
County of Los Angeles

Cindy Allen
Long Beach City Councilmember
Second District

Suzie Price
Long Beach City Councilmember
Third District

Thank you to Dedicated Community Members

Diane Jacobus
Bonnie Lowenthal
Rex Pritchard and Long Beach Firefighters Local 372
Lisa West, Third District

LBCS Mission Statement

The Long Beach Camerata Singers is dedicated to excellence in choral music. We enrich the lives of our communities and performers through a broad spectrum of repertoire, innovative programming, and arts education.