Director Michael Culloton — who was quarantined with Covid-19 — led the Concordia Choir on a video screen. (Photos/ Photo/Lindsay Arbach)

Nancy Edmonds Hanson

Were this a normal year, Concordia College choristers and musicians would be resting this week after four performances of their annual Christmas concerts, the traditional beginning of the Christmas season for 10,000 to 12,000 thrilled fans. They would be preparing to take their show on the road next week to St. Paul’s Orchestra Hall, where another 5,000 would already treasure tickets to revel in one of the region’s most venerable holiday traditions.

But in its 93rd year, the Christmas concert of 2020 is anything but normal. Pandemic precautions have closed the doors on live performances. Instead of climbing onto risers in front of an enthusiastic audience, masked vocalists were spaced across the permanent bleachers in an otherwise empty Memorial Auditorium. Musicians played their instruments behind the same blue medical masks, with wind instruments throttled by their own fabric coverings.

Most emblematic of all, director Dr. Michael Culloton – in his first year at the helm, after the close of the Rene Clausen era – led his choir not in person, but from a oversized video screen … for, in the crowning irony of this year of years, he was under quarantine as a victim of COVID-19.

Yet Concordia’s vaunted musical department has persevered. The show will go on, as it has since 1927: Different, certainly, but still raising a valiant voice of hope.

“We accepted the fact there would be no traditional concert in June,” Michael says. “I met with my colleagues from all the ELCA colleges on a Zoom call to try to figure out the pandemic’s impact on our activities, especially the biggest ones like this concert. I remember feeling a great sense of relief at the end of that call. At least I wasn’t alone.”

Some colleges simply canceled their events. Others chose to share videos from past years. “But I wanted our students to have this experience,” he says, “for three reasons.

“First, it’s the capstone experience for our music majors. We work on this for most of fall semester. Without it, what kind of impact would it have on them?” Second, he felt – still feels – it was important to mark this historic time in the season of COVID. “Finally,” he says, “my driving reason was that as a college of the church, it’s our responsibility to sing of the season of Christ’s birth. That steers us in a lot of ways. If the music doesn’t survive, the message is profound.”

And so Michael and choir manager Wyatt Steinke, along with their colleagues, set out to create a different kind of Concordia Christmas concert. They recruited a local video production firm to reproduce the famed concert experience on video.

Instead of purchasing tickets at $20, the audience is invited to register online and receive a link to the webpage where “Sun of Justice, Reveal the Dawn” debuts on Dec. 18. It will be available online through the end of the month. To register, go to ConcordiaChristmas.com. “In a way, it has worked out well,” the director observes. He and Wyatt put together a Christmas gift box of mugs with Paul Johnson’s mural art and a CD of the 2019 concert gift-wrapped in maroon and gold and offered it on the same site. Not only did the 250 gift boxes sell out; they noticed that many of the orders were coming from distant states. “The online concert will reach many, many Cobbers who wouldn’t be close enough to attend a normal concert anyway,” he says.

Some aspects of the traditional concert will be missing. One is the enormous mural that has graced the stage since Cy Running designed the first in 1940. Instead, artist Paul Johnson’s work will appear throughout the video. Too, the mass choir pieces were unworkable with social distancing. Each of the ensembles – Michael’s 60-voice Concert Choir and Kira Winter’s 70-member Chapel Choir, 45-member Cantabile and 60-member Kantorei units – will perform along with the orchestra, band and percussion ensemble.

The online debut will, in a way, also mark Michael’s private triumph over COVID. “I had been taking precautions all semester,” he confides, isolating himself in his basement from his wife and two daughters. He took the most stringent precautions, he says, to insure that no matter what, he would be available for the Christmas concert.

The music department, like the rest of the campus, had seen some students quarantining over past months, either due to exposure to the virus or being diagnosed. Most choirs practiced together only on rare occasions, rehearsing instead in smaller contingents or outdoors. The Concert Choir was divided into 20-person sections dubbed gold, maroon and blue (for the color of their robes), rehearsing separately each day. Only when restrictions were eased did they come together in the recital hall.

Despite all his months-long efforts, Michael tested positive for the corona virus on Nov. 11 – three days before the beginning of the two-day taping sessions on Nov. 14-15. “After everything, who wasn’t able to be present?” he says. “Me, the conductor.

“It was heartbreaking to get that positive test,” he admits. “I’d only taken it because I was supposed to have shoulder surgery the following week, and they had to make sure I was clear.”

He called his wife and daughters, then reached out to his mentor Clausen, now living in the Twin Cities, for whom he’d worked as an assistant for the past eight years. “We allowed our emotions to do what they needed to do,” he says of their mutual mourning.

“Somehow I got over my embarrassment. After all, I was one of 12 million Americans who caught it,” he says. “Thank God, I was and am still feeling great.” He and the staff came up with a solution: They brought a gigantic video screen into the auditorium, and he directed the performance from his own basement.

Michael spent eight years in Rochester, Minnesota, as art director and conductor of the community-based Honors Choirs of Southeast Minnesota and Choral Arts Ensemble. He returned to Concordia as associate director of choirs in 2012. He became the fourth director of choral activities in the college’s history when Clausen retired last spring.

2020 has been a most unusual introduction into the role he used to dream of. But Culloton speaks optimistically of how the challenge of the pandemic has worked out. “I am glad that, if this was going to happen, it occurred during my first year rather than Dr. Claus en’s last,” he muses. “It would have been awful if he had had to end his career after 34 years on this note. I’m happy to take the hit for him.

“Like many Concordia music majors, my dream was to come back here someday. My goal has always been to be happy in my work and work with students who want to become music teachers,” he says, and adds, “and to be with choirs every day. I have been greatly blessed.”