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ERIC HOLTAN
Music That Brings Joy And Hope
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Eric Holtan has a habit traced to childhood of blending imagination and music talent with reality. That’s what it took to launch True Concord Voices & Orchestra in 2004 and to perform through the pandemic. Being a basketball fan also helped.
As founding music director of the professional chamber choir and orchestra, Holtan is quick to say True Concord’s success is a team effort of artists, board members, staff, and supporters. But it doesn’t begin without a church-going boy’s fascination with “the majesty of the organ and its capacity to lead and inspire collective singing.”
Holtan started playing the organ as soon as his feet could touch the pedals. At 12, he was meeting a Minnesota small town organist’s needs. In college, he excelled in choir and was inspired to become a conductor, the focus of his postgraduate studies.
Holtan, who is also music director at Dove of Peace Lutheran Church, dreamed up True Concord near the end of his doctoral program at the University of Arizona. He believed a professional chamber choir and orchestra would give Tucson something it didn’t have.
During the worst period of the pandemic, True Concord gave southern Arizona what it needed.
If there were a box score of how Holtan’s team dealt with COVID-19, the NBA and WNBA would get an assist. True Concord borrowed from the leagues’ 2020 bubble season playbook to perform while keeping artists and audiences safe. It performed 32 public concerts and seven video recordings with Arizona PBS during the pandemic.
“We exist to create experiences that move, enrich and inspire,” Holtan said. “Now, more than ever, people need music, they need art, they need hope, they need a sense of peace, they need some joy.”
True Concord, led by Holtan’s dedication to masterworks and music that reflects the nation’s cultural heritage, is what facing that reality sounds like.
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