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Sacramento Choral Society & Orchestra

The Sacramento Choral Society and Orchestra (SCSO) is an auditioned, volunteer chorus of 150-180 voices and its own 55-member professional orchestra located in Sacramento, California. The SCSO was founded in 1996 by its Music Director, Donald Kendrick. The mission of the SCSO is a commitment to performance, education, and appreciation of a wide range of choral orchestral music for the Greater Sacramento Region. The group is known as the Sacramento Choral Society (SCS) when not performing with its orchestra.

The SCSO performs three to five concerts per season at the Sacramento Community Center Theater and Memorial Auditorium in Sacramento and Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at the University of California at Davis. The SCSO's repertoire embraces the great choral works from the Renaissance to contemporary composers. The group performs an annual Christmas concert, Home for the Holidays, and has also produced concerts featuring songs from musical theater.

In 2009 the SCS initiated a Sacramento Stained Glass Series at Sacramento's landmark Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, a venue which allows performance of smaller-scale choral repertoire in the more intimate acoustics of a church. The series was expanded to include performances at Fremont Presbyterian Church, Sacramento. In 2010 the SCS received an award from the Irvine Arts Fund of the Sacramento Region Community Foundation in recognition of the artistic innovation of the Stained Glass Series.

According to Chorus America in Washington, DC, the SCSO is the only community chorus among 12,000 community choruses in the U.S. to have a collective bargaining agreement with its own 55-member professional symphony orchestra.

The SCSO regularly engages in self-funded national and international tours. The group has performed at New York’s Carnegie Hall (2003); a European tour including Munich, Vienna, Budapest, and Prague (2004); a China tour including Bejing, Tianjin, Xian, Jinan, and the Great Wall (2006); a performance with its own orchestra at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2008); and a tour of Vancouver and Victoria, Canada (2009).

The group has recorded six CDs: European Horizons, recorded July 12, 2004 at Liszt Academy, Budapest, Hungary; China Odyssey, recorded July 11, 2006 at Forbidden City Concert Hall, Beijing, China; Eternal Light, recorded June 27, 2008 at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA; Carmina Burana, recorded May 2, 2010	at UC Davis Mondavi Center, Davis, CA; Verdi Requiem, recorded	March 19, 2011 at UC Davis Mondavi Center, Davis,  CA; Home for the Holidays, recorded December 10-11, 2011 at UC Davis Mondavi Center, Davis, CA.

In 2011, the SCSO was featured in a documentary, Viewfinder: Sacramento Choral Society and Orchestra, produced by KVIE Public TV. The documentary captures the care and commitment of the individual chorus members which, together with the orchestra members, creates a shared passion that translates into memorable performances that enrich the cultural life of Sacramento. In 2012 the documentary was released for national distribution to Public Television stations.