2026–2027 · Season overview
The Season.
Three distinct programs invite listeners across styles, texts, and centuries—each shaped by individual voices, close listening, and the shared experience of live music.
01 · En Masse
November 802 · Amor
February 1403 · Passion
March 20
Season at a glance
Three works. Three paths.
Every work is built differently. Across these three programs, harmony, melody, rhythm, and text lead in different ways, inviting the audience along paths that move across styles, centuries, and emotional worlds.
01 · Fall 2026
En Masse
Choral writing and jazz meet in a program that asks singers and listeners to hear how contrasting musical languages can open into one another.
02 · Winter 2027
Amor
Love is never one thing. It can be tender, playful, devoted, wounded, restless, generous, and enduring. Amor explores those many flavors through contrasting texts, colors, and musical styles, with each work offering its own way of hearing and understanding love.
03 · Spring 2027
Passion
Handel’s sacred drama leads the audience through Passion, Resurrection, and redemption with members of the Fox Valley Orchestra.
Concert one · Fall 2026
The program
Sound gathers in clear lines, then opens into rhythm, color, and swing.
En Masse begins with the clarity and resonance of sacred choral music before moving toward Will Todd’s jazz-inflected mass and a new work by Kenneth Martin. Fox Valley Jazz Big Band joins the singers as one musical language grows into another inside Marmion Abbey.
The musical arc
Honoring the traditional choral canon even as we celebrate the rich, eclectic voices of our time.
One ensemble. Many currents.
Sacred motets establish the program’s choral center: balanced lines, blended vowels, and a shared resonance shaped by the acoustic of Marmion Abbey.
As jazz enters, pulse and color begin to shift. The choir remains a collective instrument, but now it moves through syncopation, improvisatory energy, and collaboration with the Fox Valley Jazz Big Band.
The visual language reflects the program itself: individual marks gathered into one field, held together by rhythm, repetition, and forward motion.
Listening across traditions
A short guide to the musical conversation at the center of the program.
The mass as a living form.
The words of the mass have inspired composers for centuries. What changes is the musical world built around them.
In traditional sacred settings, the mass often unfolds through carefully balanced vocal lines and a unified choral sonority. Its familiar text gives composers a stable structure within which harmony, texture, and expression can continually be renewed.
Will Todd’s Jazz Missa Brevis places that historic text inside the language of jazz. Swing, syncopation, rich harmony, and rhythmic flexibility do not replace the sacred tradition; they reveal another way for communal music to breathe.
En Masse invites listeners to hear continuity and change at once: an old form, a new pulse, and many performers becoming one sound.
Join us at Marmion Abbey
Experience En Masse in concert.
Tickets are available online through the Fox Valley Music Consortium’s secure ThunderTix ticketing service.
02 · Winter 2027
Amor
A Fox Chamber Singers tradition
The concert
Love is never only one thing.
Fox Chamber Singers returns to its February tradition with a program that explores love in its many forms: tender and playful, sacred and human, fulfilled and unrequited, wounded and resilient. The music moves among intimacy, delight, longing, loss, devotion, and the bonds that gather people together.
Rather than offering a single definition, Amor listens for love’s changing colors—its sweetness, its ache, its humor, its contradictions, and its enduring power to draw us beyond ourselves.
From the artistic vision
In earlier programs, love has appeared as charity and community, as the joy of being seen, as the desire to be held close, and as the quiet recognition that another person can brighten a darkened world.
It has also arrived through absence, jealousy, grief, tears, surrender, and the fear that a perfect moment cannot last. Amor makes room for all of it, trusting choral music to hold tenderness and turmoil in the same breath.
The many flavors of love
One word. Many worlds.
Love that gathers
Affection becomes community: voices meet, divisions soften, and people discover the joy of belonging to something larger than themselves.
Love that delights
Playfulness, attraction, laughter, warmth, and the thrill of recognition remind us that love can be light on its feet.
Love that aches
Longing, distance, betrayal, and grief expose love’s vulnerability—the way its absence can inhabit every thought.
Love that endures
Beyond the first spark is the harder promise: to remain, to carry one another, and to answer darkness with life.
Join us at Marmion Abbey
Experience Amor in concert.
Tickets are available online through the Fox Valley Music Consortium’s secure ThunderTix ticketing service.
Fox Chamber Singers · 2026–2027
Passion
Concert three · Spring 2027
The concert
Handel’s Messiah beyond the Christmas season.
Fox Chamber Singers joins members of the Fox Valley Orchestra for Parts II and III of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah. The music carries the story through suffering, crucifixion, resurrection, and the promise of redemption.
The dramatic arc
The final two parts of Handel’s oratorio move from public conflict and private grief toward resurrection and renewal.
Suffering is not the final word.
Part II traces rejection, sacrifice, and death before turning toward the Resurrection and the proclamation of hope. Handel gives the chorus an unusually active role, allowing the crowd, the faithful, and the larger human community to enter the drama.
Part III looks beyond the immediate events of the Passion. Its music considers mortality, transformation, and the promise that loss can open into new life. The result is not simply a sequence of familiar choruses, but a complete journey from anguish toward assurance.
A recent Fox Chamber Singers and Fox Valley Orchestra collaboration
Looking back
Returning to a work already central to the ensemble’s story.
In March 2026, Fox Chamber Singers joined the Fox Valley Orchestra at Marmion Abbey for a program centered on the Passion and Resurrection portions of Messiah. The collaboration placed Handel’s music within the season its subject matter evokes and gave the singers and orchestra a shared dramatic language.
Passion returns to that repertoire not as a holiday custom, but as a continuing exploration of the work’s scale, theatrical force, and movement from grief toward renewal.
A work larger than a season
From Dublin to Passion
Handel composed Messiah as a three-part oratorio. Its first public performance took place in Dublin in April 1742, in the Easter season—not as a Christmas concert. Part I moves through prophecy and birth; Parts II and III carry the story through suffering, resurrection, and redemption.
The manuscript page shown here comes from Part II. It is a reminder that the familiar Christmas selections belong to a much larger dramatic design: one that turns from incarnation toward sacrifice, conflict, mortality, and hope.
Heard in spring, the work’s later chapters return to the season and dramatic context that first brought Messiah before the public.
Hearing Handel anew
A brief guide to the larger story behind one of the most familiar works in the choral tradition.
Beyond Christmas
In the United States, Messiah is often associated with December. Christmas, however, is only the beginning of the oratorio’s story.
Part I moves through prophecy and the birth of Christ. Parts II and III turn toward the Passion, Resurrection, and the promise of redemption. Together, the three parts form a much broader spiritual and dramatic journey.
The work’s first public performance took place in Dublin during the Easter season. Hearing the later portions in spring restores that larger context and brings attention to music sometimes overshadowed by the better-known Christmas selections.
This performance centers the music of the cross, the empty tomb, and the movement from grief toward hope.
Join us at Marmion Abbey
Experience Passion in concert.
Tickets are available online through the Fox Valley Music Consortium’s secure ThunderTix ticketing service.
2026–2027 season
Plan your visit.
One venue, three concert dates, and a direct path to tickets and arrival information.
Three concerts.
Marmion Abbey.
All three performances are scheduled at Marmion Abbey. Concert-specific arrival and parking details should be confirmed on the event or ticket page before attending.
One ticket hub.
Purchase tickets directly for En Masse, Amor, or Messiah: The Passion through the Fox Valley Music Consortium’s secure ThunderTix ticketing service.
Come prepared.
Review the final event listing for doors-open timing, accessibility notes, parking guidance, and any venue-specific updates before the performance.