Election Section

The sound of heaven is voices raised in song. With approximately 220 voices, Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra (BCCO) offers the East Bay community heaven on earth. Founded by Eugene Jones in 1966 as a Berkeley Adult Education Program class, BCCO offers all comers, without audition or judgment, the opportunity to rediscover the celestial song inside, despite any deficit in training or talent.  

Musical Director Arlene Sagan has lead BCCO since Jones retired in 1988. A Cal grad and professional musician who appears to be in her sixties, Sagan also directs the vocal group Bella Musica and an outreach group of the BCCO chorus known as the Berkeley Community Chamber Singers. The latter performs at hospitals, retirement homes, festivals, and the like. As director of BCCO, Sagan produces six free concerts each year for the enjoyment of nearly 3,000 appreciative classic music enthusiasts.  

This Saturday, April 3, a BCCO benefit recital features pianist and composer Julian White performing the works of Mozart, Schumann, and Schubert. The benefit will be held at 8 p.m. at the Crowden School, 1475 Rose St., Berkeley. 

White is an Arlene Sagan booster. “What makes Arlene’s situation possible is that she’s very, very open-hearted to anyone who wants to come,” he said. “It’s like out of a fairy tale: ‘If you don’t know how to sing or you don’t know how to read [music] don’t worry, we have free classes.’ She’ll teach you. I think that’s a very seductive embrace. ‘We like you independent of your vocal possibilities.’ You get accepted without having to fill out some huge IOU.” 

All that love doesn’t come without commitment. BCCO members rehearse weekly, with additional weekly sectional sessions available to those whose desire further help. And then there are the six concerts the Chorus performs each year. In early May the Chorus will perform Verdi’s Requiem three times at St. Joseph the Worker Church.  

“If you can walk, you can dance,” said Director Sagan. “If you can talk you can sing. Singing is the most wonderfully satisfying, spiritual experience. You mingle your breath together. We have people who are dying, and they come to a rehearsal and they feel better. It’s just… there’s always been singing, in terms of the history of people.” 

According to Sagan, three qualities make BCCO unique as a choral group. First, neither an audition, nor a musical education, nor vocal talent are necessary for membership.  

“When people say ‘there’s no audition,’ that usually means that you don’t have to read music,” said Sagan. “But we have people who can barely carry a tune. We’re willing to work with them. They don’t sing when they don’t know the music. And because of the fact that we do good work, and are very, very dedicated and work hard, in that group of 220 people we have graduates of music departments as well as people who’ve never seen a note before.”  

It is exactly the human quality of BCCO’s performances that Julian White appreciates most. 

“I think we’re a little bit spoiled,” White said. “We like to have our music at a certain degree of perfection that is really impractical and impossible. If I have a choice between hearing an orchestra where some of the instruments may be out of tune or some of them may be fast asleep, in some way that’s more gratifying than a really one-hundred percent perfect, industrialized, homogenized CD that has nothing to do with reality.” 

The second quality that makes BCCO unique as a chorus is the selection of music it performs. The artistic director deliberately picks difficult works by the recognized masters of classical music such as Bach and Brahms and Schubert and Verdi.  

Third, the chorus, with professional orchestral accompaniment, performs gratis, offering the public six free concerts a year.  

“When you go to concert with full orchestra, in The City or here, you pay $40, $50 a ticket,” Sagan explained. “We work very hard and we’re very organized so it’s also pretty good,” she added, with obvious pride. “We want beginners. In order to keep them we definitely make efforts to try to help them learn the music as much as they can. We’re pretty lucky because we’re big. But out of 200, 30 are basses, 20 are tenors, another 50 are sopranos and 80 are altos. So there are quite a bit more women than men, but we get enough.” 

Sagan also works to include people with disabilities in the chorus. 

“We get people who are in wheelchairs and we’ve had members who’ve been blind,” she said. More difficult is to get an ethnic balance that more represents this community. “Ethnically it’s very not mixed,” she acknowledged. “Our founding director was Eugene Jones. He was black, he tried and he couldn’t. There’s something about the kind of music we do that doesn’t attract a lot of [non-white] people.” 

While the chorus is not yet as ethnically mixed as Sagan would like, the audience is much more inclusive. BCCO fills the 500 seats available at St. Joseph the Worker for each performance. That’s 1,500 in attendance for each concert series.  

A benefit recital for Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra featuring pianist Julian White performing the works of Mozart, Schumann, and Schubert will be held Saturday, April 3 at 8 p.m. at the Crowden School, 1475 Rose St., Berkeley. Only 50 tickets ($30 each) remain. Call Johanna Clark at 526-2609 or 549-1336 to make reservations, limited seating maybe available at the door. A reception will follow.  

On May 2, 8 and 9 BCCO will perform Verdi’s Requiem for free at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St., Berkeley. Call 964-0665 or visit www.bcco.org for more information.