An awesome choir

Beautiful Savior; The Saint Olaf Choir

St. Olaf College sits atop west-facing “Manitou Heights” in eastern Minnesota in the city of Northfield. Norwegian-American immigrant pastors and farmers envisioned the need and desire for a non-secular post-secondary school steeped in Lutheran traditions and values and in 1874 established a corporation that very quickly became St. Olaf’s School that opened on January 8, 1875. Today it is an internationally respected four-year private liberal-arts college affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

The St. Olaf Choir is recognized as one of the nation’s premier collegiate ensembles and was founded in 1907 by F. Melius Christiansen. In one hundred years, the organization has had only four permanent conductors. The current conductor is Dr. Anton Armstrong, who graduated from St. Olaf College in 1978.

Beautiful Savior was an album released in 1986 when Kenneth Jennings conducted the ensemble. This is simply choral singing at its finest. The selections serve to show off the ensemble, rather than the other way around. You find yourself more enamored with the sound produced by the choir than with the features of any given composition; with one exception. “Hacia Belen va un Borrico”, arranged by Alice Parker and Robert Shaw, comes closer than all the rest to representing “world music”, a category that Dr. Armstrong champions during his directorship. The arrangement of “Beautiful Savior” by F. M. Christiansen traditionally concludes each St. Olaf Choir concert.

In 1984, I took the sojourn to Northfield, MN, to visit this wonderful campus and I was entranced. If I could have foregone the hassle of finishing high school and just started that day at St. Olaf, I think that I would have. And it would have been nice to go there. But God had something a little more down to earth for me, so my path led elsewhere. On three different occasions I have worked with Dr. Anton Armstrong and the experience left me motivated for weeks afterward. He is an inspiring artist.

St. Olaf College is the personification of everything Nordic in the state of Minnesota. A shrine to the “old country”. Luther College, Gustavus Adolphus College and St. Olaf College along with so many other upper Midwest Lutheran institutions of higher learning all have at least a touch of meaning to those of us who have a little Scandahoovian blood in our veins. They practically advertise on their syllabus: If you’re not Norwegian when you enroll, you will be when you graduate.

Credits: To 19^th century Norwegian-American pastors and farmers, who created an environment where old country values could thrive in a new land. Your contribution to our nation and its halls of learning is ginormous.