Houston Chamber Choir accomplished quite a bit during the pandemic. Employing parking garages to rehearse and rather more scenic outdoor locations for performances, the Grammy-winning ensemble successfully transitioned to the digital realm with five recorded and lip-synced concerts. The biweekly podcast it started, With One Accord, drew an international audience by featuring a wide variety of choral music, including, of course, its own.

All that, however, didn’t stop the group from pining for live audiences. When founder and artistic director Robert Simpson met with individual choir members to recap last season, that was the common thread.

“They were saying, ‘You know, we really love the things that we were able to do, but boy, do we miss singing for people,’” Simpson says. “And feeling the interaction that a performer gets from the audience: the eyes (and how) there are different kinds of silences in the room. You know the silence of rapt attention. We love that, and when it happens it’s a magical moment.”

The choir’s 26th season kicks off next month. Starting at $25, tickets for individual performances go on sale Aug. 2. Simpson settled on the theme “Sing Out the New Day” to evoke a feeling of turning the page — the idea that, although the pandemic lingers, the future is still worth celebrating.

“I was looking for a way to project our optimism and our sense of a new dawn,” he says. “We have been through a period, but that period is one that we will move through and to an exciting and hopeful new day. It was my way of saying we really are excited about the future (and) we want to bring that energy to everything that we sing.”

As exciting as the prospect of performing for live audiences again may be, Simpson acknowledges the choir’s efforts to cultivate its online presence over the past season can’t just be set aside. Therefore, both in-person and digital-only season options are available; digital access is included with in-person packages. The choir’s Friday-night dress rehearsals will now double as recording sessions; each new concert will go online about two weeks after the live performance.

“We’re really excited about the technological advances that we made last year, that we’re now able to apply even when we’re back to in-person singing,” Simpson says.

On Sept. 10, Simpson’s way of “starting off with a real bang” is the brand-new “Two Streams” by Daniel Knaggs, an alum of Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. Based on the writings of the 20th-century Polish saint Sister Faustina, the piece honors Knaggs’ late father and features four vocal soloists and the Kinetic string ensemble. That same weekend, the choir plans to record “Two Streams” with multiple-Grammy-winning producer Blanton Alspaugh.

“It is a piece that is very spiritual and is expressed musically through music that is inspired by chant, by lyricism,” Simpson says. “Not to say that it is slow-moving. It’s very driving and full of energy. I love this piece as I’ve gotten to know it.”

Other season highlights include another world premiere, Benedict Sheehan’s fairy-tale-inspired “Once Upon a Time,” scheduled for May 2022. The choir will also tend to unfinished business the previous month with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “All-Night Vigil” — which the choir was days from performing when the pandemic wiped out the balance of the 2019-20 season. Simpson is also dedicating October’s performance of Brahms’ “Ein deutsches Requiem” to Houston’s medical professionals, explaining the composer meant to create “a requiem for the living and to offer comfort to those who were left grieving.”

“I think this is going to be one way that we can offer a moment to the community, and to ourselves, to reflect back on the losses that we have suffered over the past year,” he adds, “but also take comfort in this great masterpiece and the promise of the future that this holds.”

Meanwhile, another season of With One Accord begins Sept. 6. This time Simpson hopes to feature more choirs from Europe and Asia, as well as more from across the U.S.

“I sometimes think of an artistic organization as a living organism that has to move,” he says. “It can’t sit still; it has to always be moving forward.”

Chris Gray is a Galveston-based writer.