The story of the Orange County Women’s Chorus doesn’t begin in a concert hall, conservatory, or cultural institution, but in a living room in 1997 in Irvine with nine women wondering what might happen if they simply sang together.
“We’d known one another through a church choir,” said OCWC founding board president Mary Langsdorf. “The director of that choir left for a full-time job in Los Angeles but proposed, ‘If I did something in Orange County, would you sing with me?’”
The Orange County Women’s Chorus has evolved from that small gathering into a 60-plus-voice ensemble recognized as one of the region’s leading amateur choruses. Its trajectory has carried the singers from local performances to major Southern California stages, national choral conferences, international tours and a 2022 spotlight concert at Carnegie Hall.
The chorus has performed medieval chants, multicultural folk songs, classical masterworks, gospel, protest music and contemporary compositions. It has collaborated with ensembles ranging from Men in Blaque and Bel Canto to the South Coast Symphony and the Wooden Floor. Its stages have included the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Irvine Barclay Theatre and Disney Hall’s REDCAT Theater.
Yet the most compelling measure of the chorus’s growth may not be the size of its audience or the prestige of its venues, but rather the remarkable range of lives represented in the ensemble.
The multi-generational women who stand together onstage are teachers and students, CEOs and lawyers, nurses and artists, mothers and grandmothers. They bring professions, families, convictions, disappointments, celebrations, various ethnicities and decades of lived experience into the rehearsal room, united by music.
“I am not originally from Orange County — I’m from upstate New York, and left all my siblings behind on the East Coast when I moved to California to get married,” says 66-year-old Langsdorf, who sings second soprano in the chorus. “My choirs were always my extended family, and were an important part of making me feel at home wherever I lived. I love the fact that so many of our singers come from somewhere else, and find us when they are searching for a place to sing in their new homes.”
Among those singers is Bethany Justice, who grew up singing in church choirs in the Philippines until she immigrated with her family to the United States in 1999. She sang in her new country for 20 years before taking a break and finding her way back to music through the OCWC in 2023.
“OC Women’s Chorus has really shown me the world in a very different light,” says Justice. “What we sing about and what we stand for — our last concert felt especially empowering.”
Justice refers to “Border Crossings,” a last minute change of repertoire — about the ties that bind, not the walls that divide — which recently wrapped up the OCWC 28th concert season featuring music by immigrant and refugee composers. Part of a trio, she sang “Bayan Ko” a kundiman (ballad) written by José Alejandrino in Spanish, translated by poet José Corazón de Jesús in Tagalog and arranged by fellow OCWC member Karina Melgar.
“It felt like home,” says Justice, 39. “That song carried me back to the Philippines, to the person I was before my father’s death, my mother’s passing and the hardships of immigrating.”
For Samantha Gossage, an elementary music teacher and mom, rehearsals have become her weekly self-care time. “It’s a home away from home,” she said. “Truly, the women in this choir are so kind and loving and the support is endless.”
That collective voice has been shaped since 2000 by artistic director Eliza Rubenstein, whose tenure has become central to the chorus’s identity. Rubenstein, who also directs choral and vocal activities at Orange Coast College, has developed an artistic profile committed to performing music from different cultures and eras, in original languages — that includes new music and up-and-coming musicians.
“One of the things that has made this group successful and has made it last is that from the very beginning they were pretty clear that they wanted to do things the right way,” she says. “They didn’t want it to be a social club. They didn’t want it to be casual. They were going to build something that would sustain itself.”
“Last year, our youngest member was 19, and our oldest was close to 80,” Rubenstein said.
Founding member Mary Watson-Bruce says her group “has evolved to be on time, pointed and fearless” and credits the organization’s leadership. “Eliza is a brilliant woman who pays attention to what’s going on in the world and what we all need for our souls.”
Season DETAILS
29th Season: Listen To Women
Angels Among Us: Dec. 5 & 6
You Can Tell The World: March 20 & 21, 2027
Maiden, Mother, Crone: June 5 & 6, 2027
Where: St. Wilfred of York Episcopal Church, 18631 Chapel Lane, Huntington Beach
Tickets: On sale starting Sept. 1
More Info: ocwomenschorus.org
There’s a lot to reflect on as the Laguna Hills-based organization enters its 29th season.
The 2026-27 program will a feature a series of three concerts starting in December with “Angels Among Us,” which Rubenstein said is about the reframing of who’s an angel and who brings those startling truths into our world today, followed by “You Can Tell the World” in March, that will highlight different representations of the African American musical tradition and conclude with “Maiden, Mother, Crone” in June 2027, which will focus on the stages of life women go through and the expectations and labels placed on them by society.
“As I’ve gotten older, I have come to believe even more in not just the power of women’s voices, but the obligation of women’s voices to speak out for what’s right, what’s just and what’s humane, and one of the ways I know how to do that is through music,” says Rubenstein. “We have found that audiences embrace that. When we do a challenging theme, people meet us there.”
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