Fifty of Hillsborough High School’s choir students will perform at Carnegie Hall on Friday, Dec. 4, as part of Tim Janis’s “The American Christmas Carol.”
The students will join a choir made up of more than 200 students from across the Northeast. The choir, with full orchestra, will join composer Tim Janis, Grammy Award-winning musician Sarah McLachlan, actor-singer Ioan Gruffudd and Zachary Levi on stage for the holiday performance.
The program, now in its 10th year at Carnegie Hall, is an annual fund-raising event for actress Kate Winslet’s Golden Hat Foundation, which is dedicated to changing the way people with autism are perceived, and the Sarah McLachlan School of Music, which provides music instruction at no cost to at-risk and underserved children and youth.
The choir students were invited to join the benefit concert following their performance last May at the New Jersey American Choral Directors Association’s High School Choral Festival at Rutgers University.
The choir students are weekly rehearsing and memorzing original arrangements of such classic pieces as “O Holy Night,” “Ave Maria” and “Three Kings from Persian Lands Afar” when they join the full choir while performing as back-up to the featured celebrity guests.
“This is an amazing opportunity for our choir members,” said Julianna LoBiondo, director of choral music at Hillsborough High School. “These 50 students are very dedicated to their craft. To be able to sing on stage at Carnegie Hall with professional musicians is a wonderful holiday gift.”
Students Deepti Kumar and Jillian Cuzzolino have been recently selected as All State Mixed Chorus members and Katie Ciurleo and Emily Simroth as All State Women’s Chorus members.
Tickets are available on the Carnegie Hall Box Office website, www.carnegiehall.org.
