Vox Aurea is a Finnish youth choir who will be visiting our community to share their song at Christ Episcopal Church at 4 p.m. on both Monday and Tuesday. That alone would be reason enough to have a gander, but the plot thickens when you take a look at the program. The choir will be performing Echoes of Eureka, an opera by Bay Area composer and conductor Eric Tuan, about the violent expulsion of more than 300 Chinese immigrants from Eureka in 1885. The story centers around a teenager named Charley Wei Lum, a real person who lived through that horrific event and narrowly escaped being lynched due to the intervention of the Reverend Charles Huntington, a local priest. The seven-act choral opera features additional libretto work by the author Emily Jiang and poet Daryl Ngee Chinn, and each performance will be followed by a question-and-answer interview session with Vox Aurea, facilitated by Jean Pfaelzer, who wrote Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans about the purging of Chinese immigrants in the Pacific Northwest. There is no charge for tickets, but donations are happily accepted.
Music Tonight: Monday/Tuesday, July 20-21
