NHSCF

Even before the big day at Carnegie Hall, Ann Huff will have achieved a lifelong dream.

A descendent of Swedish immigrants, Huff grew up in a household in which conversation at the dinner table revolved around such choral masters as Robert Shaw and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Not surprisingly, she always wanted to be a music teacher, and choral music, above all else, has been her chief love.

Now, as choral director at William G. Enloe High School in Raleigh, North Carolina, she will bring her students to New York to perform Brahms’s mighty German Requiem, the centerpiece of this season’s Carnegie Hall National High School Choral Festival.

The German Requiem is a difficult work rarely performed in high school, but Huff still decided to apply to the Choral Festival. “I thought: You know what? We’ll just go for it,” she says. “We’ll keep at it until we master it.”

She got the news that her students made the cut in May of last year, and ever since, the excitement has mounted.

It was in October, as part of the teacher-development portion of the Choral Festival, that Huff fulfilled her childhood wish. That’s when the four choral directors were flown to Salt Lake City for a long weekend to observe and collaborate with Mormon Tabernacle Choir director Dr. Craig Jessop, the guiding force of the Choral Festival.

“Just being able to sit in the middle of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and be surrounded by that beautiful singing, with everyone being so kind to us, made us feel that teachers are valued, that what we do has an impact,” she says. “But the beauty of the music, that last day on Sunday—the four of us shed a lot of tears.”

It’s an emotional experience for the selected teachers and students, but for Dr. Jessop himself, it’s a no less powerful event.

“Without question, after my own job at the Tabernacle this is the top priority for me,” the tireless director said in a phone interview conducted at the crack of dawn, Mountain Time. “I really believe in it, and I’ve seen the impact it has on the students and the teachers.”

A striking statement from one of the choral world’s brightest luminaries, but one that becomes clearer when you learn how much he believes in “the power and the beauty of music” and its ability to change lives. “I tell these young students that when I’m in my nursing home, I’ll be in great hands,” he says, “because these kids are such remarkable young people.”