Can you imagine an amateur community choir from Aptos, CA (population 6,600), 10 miles up the coast from Watsonville, being invited to perform in the Vatican as part of an observance marking the 500th anniversary of the founding of the Vatican Choir?

The Cabrillo Symphonic Chorus has done that and much more, enjoying “a stellar reputation” both locally and internationally, according to the website of Cabrillo College, a community college in Aptos with which the choir is affiliated. “Under the direction of Cheryl Anderson, the Cabrillo Symphonic Chorus has toured throughout the finest concert halls in the United States and Europe.”

Carolyn O’Donnell, communications director for the California Strawberry Commission in Watsonville, CA, has been singing with the Cabrillo Symphonic Chorus for about 15 years and had the opportunity in summer 2012 to participate in a tour that took the group not only to Rome but to Croatia, Slovania and several other European venues.

“The chorus had as a long history of tackling a lot of important musical works” and of “being invited to perform in different places,” O’Donnell told The Produce News Jan. 21. Although attached to the college, “it is largely made up of community people,” with only about 15 percent of the typically 80 to 100 choir members being regular college students. Giving those students “that big symphonic chorus experience is what those community members provide.”

O’Donnell had been very much involved in vocal music from early elementary school through high school. She also played flute. But from college through early adulthood, she said, “I wasn’t really too engaged in music.”

That changed in the mid-1990s when a neighbor invited her to attend a choral group concert. She had not been to such an event in years, and sitting there “amidst the harmonies” brought back memories of how much she loved “being with other people and creating this amazing sound.”

She told herself, “I need to be here. I need to go back to this,” and she did.

She sang with some local community groups for a couple of years, and then she learned about the symphonic chorus. It was an auditioned group, so she took voice lessons “so I could get through the audition, and I have been with them ever since.”

Over the next several years, O’Donnell toured with the choir on various occasions, including a trip to New York for a performance at Carnegie Hall, but the 2012 trip to Europe was a highlight.

The Cabrillo Symphonic Chorus had sung at the Vatican before, prior to O’Donnell’s joining the group, so the invitation to participate in the Vatican Choir’s 500-year celebration was a return engagement.

“Because everybody pays their own way on a tour and Italy is expensive,” the members of the chorus decided to extend the tour to some less expensive parts of Europe, she said. “We started out in Croatia.” They sang in Dubrovnik, then “traveled up the Adriatic coast to Split and Zadar,” then went on to Slovenia and performed “as part of a summer music festival in Ljubljana. From there we went to Venice and we sang at St. Mark’s Cathedral,” as well as at Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari where the 16th century renaissance composer Claudio Monteverdi is buried.

“Then we went on to Rome” and sang mass at the Vatican, then did another concert at a cathedral “not far from the Pantheon,” she said.

One of the best parts of the trip for O’Donnell was “the connection we made with other musical groups on tour,” such as a college group from Turkey and a children’s group from Bulgaria. Even though they often did not speak the same language, “they sang for us and we sang for them, and we traded music,” so the Cabrillo chorus came back with folk music from Bulgaria and ancient Coptic Christian music from Turkey.

But “the best thing for me was we landed in Croatia just as they were joining the European Union. The day we were singing in Zadar was actually Croatian National Day,” June 25. As part of the festivities, there was “a whole program going on” that evening at St. Anastasia Cathedral, parts of which date back to the fourth century. “We were part of the program,” she said.

The Cabrillo chorus performed, among other numbers, the Croatian national anthem, appropriate for the occasion, and a work by 16th century Italian composer Giovanni Palestrina called Sicut Cervus, based on Psalm 42:1.

The chorus sang Sicut Cervus in Latin, but an English translation of the psalm reads, “As the deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, my God.”

After the concert, the chorus members returned to their changing room in what had once been a chapel, now a sacristy, in one of the oldest parts of the cathedral. O’Donnell said that there were faded frescos on the wall, and red carpet covered the floor. While there, the cathedral’s choir director and priest came to thank them for being there and said, “We’d like to show you what’s under this carpet.” Furniture was moved and the carpet was rolled back to reveal a tile mosaic dating from the 12th century. The mosaic depicted two deer gracefully bending to drink from a pool, illustrating Psalm 42:1.

The members of the Cabrillo Symphonic Chorus spontaneously encircled the mosaic art and sang Sicut Cervus once again.

It was “a remarkable thing” to make that connection “through all those centuries of story and music threaded through cultures that were oceans apart,” O’Donnell said.

Of that experience, she wrote in her travel blog, “Moments like this cannot be booked, bought or reserved. They come when you connect with others to share the beauty of music and an appreciation of art and time and history and culture. When they all meld together, it’s simply magic.”

O’Donnell’s day job is promoting another kind of “magic,” California strawberries.