After three months of practice, the choir program reached the culmination of its hard work with 90 minutes of pure, choral harmony. Portola High held the “Stronger Together” concert on March 18 at the theater, featuring collaborations with both professionally-hired soloists and the Jeffrey Trail middle choir. Members of orchestra also accompanied the singers for their grand finale.

“As the year has progressed and we’ve been able to do more of the things that we lost during the pandemic, we thought an important idea was the idea of community and rebuilding a community,” choir director Adrian Rangel-Sanchez said. “For me, an important thing is that our choir program is not just individual choirs, but it’s really a big choir family across all the choirs.”

All levels of choir performed in the concert, from the contemporary Vocal Performance to the classical Portola Singers. There were many different musical styles in the first act, including folksier Finnish track “Who Can Sail Without The Wind” and the JTMS choir’s performance of hit Broadway song “Seize the Day” from “Newsies.”

“We wanted to do a collaboration with [JTMS and the other choirs] as well since the other three choirs were already collaborating for the Requiem, so we picked ‘Baba Yetu,’ which is a song about the world and togetherness,” Rangel-Sanchez said. “It’s a Swahili African song, so all three of the choirs learned it, and then we’ve put it all together to be the finale for the first half of the concert.”

The second act of the performance took on a different task entirely: a forty-minute requiem entitled “Eternal Light” performed by the Treblemakers, Canta Bella and Portola Singers. They were accompanied by two outside soloists, one of whom, Katy Martini, will be added to the full-time Portola High choir faculty as a soprano vocal coach in the near future, according to Rangel-Sanchez.

“It’s an experience that we don’t really do for the other concerts, and singing a work of music for 40 minutes all together, if we ever sing together, it’s only a couple minutes,” Portola Singers member and junior Shefali Sinha said. “This is definitely an unprecedented event.”

Uniting multiple different choirs through one extended piece helped fellow choir members bond and tackle their emotions in a poignant way, according to Canta Bella member and sophomore Kody Lin.

“We all congregated inside of the choir room, and Mr. Rangel gave us this beautiful speech about what this piece meant to him…it’s this moment that we all shared over the past months of working on this tirelessly in our frustrations,” Lin said. “Getting to share that with everyone was really beautiful to me, because you can see it affected everyone so differently, but the impact still remained the same to everyone.”