The Minot State University Concert Choir is preparing for its spring concert on March 8 at 7:30 p.m. in Ann Nicole Nelson Hall on the MSU campus.

Emerson Eads, director of choral activities and assistant professor of music at MSU, said it will be a benefit concert for Project Bee, providing equity and anti-poverty services to rural communities in North Dakota.

The concert will feature MSU student and soprano soloist, Megan Kramer, and MSU student and organist, Kevin Vandal in Haydn’s “Little Organ Mass,” a Viennese Trio mass. MSU student and soprano, Christina Larsen, will be featured in Craig Hella Johnson’s “The Water is Wide.”

With help from the Diversity Council at MSU and the EMPOWER grant from the MSU Foundation, MSU alumnus Nathan Bowles will return to his hometown to be featured in Adolphus Hailstork’s cantata, “I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes.”

According to Eads, this rarely performed cantata, written in 1989, is a demanding work for tenor, and may be the first time it has ever been performed in its entirety in North Dakota.

The March 8 concert will be followed by a benefit concert tour to Stanley High School, Trinity Lutheran’s Community Center, Bismarck, (March 9 at 7 p.m.) and Assumption Abbey (March 10 at 7:30 p.m.) in Richardton and feature Dickinson High School’s Women’s Choir conducted by MSU Alumnus Matt Goettle, the Concert and Symphonic Choirs conducted by Sarah Olson, and Watford City’s High School Choir conducted by Anna Schwartz. The concerts are free and monies collected will benefit Project Bee.