By Sruly Meyer – COLlive
Yerachmiel Begun and his Miami Boys Choir (MBC) are introducing a new double album, One Voice, with volume 1 released before Pesach.
Launching it will be two concerts on Chol Hamoed Pesach – Thursday, April 25, at 1:30 PM and 4:30 PM at the Union Performing Arts Center in Rahway, New Jersey. These concerts will also feature Uri Davidi, Dovid Pearlman, and The Miami Teens.
VIDEO: ‘One Voice’ release party
This new Pesach show follows an old practice – the Miami Experience concerts Begun would pull off for years. “I’ve been doing this a very long time now, and I would say that the Miami Experience shows really were a watershed moment for the Miami Boys Choir,” Begun told COLlive.com.
“We started with one show in 1991 called the Miami Experience. It was a huge success, so we did two shows for Miami Experience 2 the next year. Then, every year, we added a show to correspond with the year. Miami Experience 3 had three shows and so on.”
One of the things Begun learned from producing Yom Tov shows was perfecting the timing. “One year, Yom Tov was Shabbos and Sunday. We scheduled the first show for Sunday night, which was Motzoei the first days. It was definitely a challenge to do a show so late and right after Yom Tov. We learned the hard way that it isn’t a great idea…”
These annual shows produced an uncontested classic, Miami Experience 4 from 1994, now celebrating 30 years. It featured “Around the World with MBC,” a spectacular song and dance performance that imagines what will happen in Mexico, China, Russia, England, and Israel when Moshiach comes.
“The Haggadah production was a 30-minute piece and I was concerned it would go too long,” Begun says. “But all these years later, people still tell me how they sing those songs by the Seder. The song Avodim He’inu was composed especially for this show, and it was a big challenge to have the arrangement as a live performance. Thankfully, as expected, Yisroel Lamm did an amazing job.”
A second segment, “The Haggadah,” introduced new songs in harmony with an adult men’s choir. In that show, Miami performed one of their all-time most widely acclaimed hits, “Nekadesh,” and displayed their amazing dance skills in a Chassidic-themed performance featuring clarinet player Yehuda Spinner.
“At the time, I didn’t know how to read music so well,” Begun said. It was a complicated process. I wrote all the songs, Yisroel Lamm wrote all the harmonies, and we had to get a musician to play out his sheets. It was really amazing seeing the musical collaborative process come together, especially the Vehi Sheamda, which was truly symphonic.”
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“Miami Experience 4 was a milestone concert in the series,” he adds. “The success was so big that it inspired me to move the venue from Brooklyn College to Nassau Coliseum the next year. There, we had five shows and over 15,000 people in attendance. It’s still one of the largest audiences in America for a Chassidic concert.”
That being said, Begun is eagerly looking forward to the upcoming One Voice concerts. It will feature songs from the new album plus many of their classic hits. Tickets are available at miamiboyschoir.com
