Enchanté
Courtesy Photo

With help from the Santa Barbara community, New York City’s historic Carnegie Hall will soon play host to a group of students from San Marcos High. Enchanté, the school’s advanced women’s choir, not only qualified for the Festival at Carnegie Hall, but they beat out the nine other attending choirs for the chance to perform solo during the performance on Sunday, March 18.

The event, put on by WorldStrides Heritage Music Performance Programs, will feature about 425 high school vocalists performing together as a group. Enchanté, however, will be highlighted as the only choir group singing alone, with 15 minutes of solo performance time.

Enchanté was invited to the Festival because of its top placement for the women’s division at Heritage festivals in San Diego and Anaheim during the past two years. After having to turn down the invite in 2010 and 2011 due to insufficient funding, the singers are thrilled to be spending five days in the city that never sleeps.

“We’re all so excited to be finally going,” said senior and president of Enchanté, Claire Burdick. “We’ve stayed on the West Coast for all of our competitions.”

The group has been fundraising up a storm; See’s candy sales, a Mother’s Day tea and silent auction, and many other programs have all been used to help raise the $60,000 needed to send the choir to New York. The choral department will hold its biggest fundraising event on Friday, March 9, in the school’s auditorium, where all the vocal groups of San Marcos High will sing eight hours of Broadway hits. In this third annual Broadway Musical Marathon, the students will attempt to perform 140 songs and will be accepting monetary donations and pledges per song.

While Enchanté attends festivals on the West Coast on an annual basis, the group also traveled to Europe during the summer of 2008 for a trip that included a concert at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

“We sing at festivals because we live in a tiny town and [festivals give] my students the opportunity to learn from world-class directors and meet other students,” said Choir Director Carolyn Teraoka-Brady. “It’s just great.”

For more information about this Friday’s Broadway Musical Marathon, or to donate to Enchanté, call 967-4581 x357.

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