Members of Eastern’s Concert Choir took advantage of an old Christmas tradition when they took a trip to Pennsylvania over spring break to perform in the Saint Vincent Archabbey Basilica.

“I used to perform there with my groups, but only at Christmas time,” said Richard Rossi, an alumnus of Saint Vincent College and Saint Vincent Seminary and current concert choir director and assistant music professor at Eastern.

Thirty-four students, consisting of the 31-member Concert Choir and three string players from Eastern traveled to Latrobe, Pa. March 11 to tour Saint Vincent College and perform at 8 p.m. in the Catholic Church on campus, the Saint Vincent Archabbey Basilica.

At the basilica, the choir performed a nearly two-hour show in front of about 75 people, said sophomore music education major Sarah Banovic, a soloist and member of the choir. The choir sang 17 pieces, two of which were long-lost compositions by Austrian composer Joseph Matthias Kracher.

“Kracher was a self-taught composer,” Rossi said. “His musical compositions, which are exclusively sacred, follow the Viennese tradition as those of Joseph Haydn and Michael Haydn.”

The Latrobe monastery’s collection of Kracher’s works at Saint Vincent can be traced back to Saint Vincent’s founder, Boniface Wimmer, Rossi said.

Rossi, former conductor of The Saint Vincent Camerata and founder of The Saint Vincent Camerata Chamber Orchestra, has been transcribing Kracher’s works for chamber orchestra and choir from the well-preserved, original compositions, he said. He is also trying to produce a complete conductor’s score for the music.

“Each vocal and instrumental part was written on separate parchment sheets in their respective clefs, and no full score was provided or used,” Rossi said.

The group left for Pennsylvania on March 9 and performed at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art. Banovic said the group casually sang several of the songs they were to perform at the basilica in the museum’s Hall of Architecture as people walked by.

While in Pittsburgh, the choir attended a River City Brass and Mendelssohn Choir concert. The concert consisted of many opera pieces as well as a West Side Story arrangement and “America the Beautiful,” Banovic said.

On March 11, the group took a tour of Saint Vincent College in Latrobe and had a recording session from 1 to 4 p.m.

“We recorded six of our pieces,” Banovic said. “That way we could do the pieces a couple times.”

One of Banovic’s favorite parts of the trip was listening to the recording on the way home, she said.

“I have never heard our group sound so amazing,” she said.

The concert at the basilica was also recorded, and the choir members will get a copy of the performance on CD, Banovic said. Some of the songs performed at the concert were songs the choir had been working on since last year, and a few they had only begun to learn two weeks before the trip, she said.

The choir sang a prelude for the stations of the cross at 7 p.m. in the basilica, and sang songs in the seminary infirmary for the monks who were not able to make it to the concert. Performing for the monks was the highlight of the trip for Banovic.

“We sang ‘O Magnum Mysterium’ by Morton Lauridsen and it was the best we had ever sung it,” Banovic said. “I think we were all crying by the end.”

The choir had been saving money from local performances around Charleston and in Champaign for the past two years to take the trip.

“I was so proud of the work we accomplished,” Banovic said. “I was able to get to know some of the members of the choir that I didn’t know so well before the trip.”