The Orfeón Lamas was a fundamental institution among the 20th century's Choral music movements in Venezuela, pioneering the genre.
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The Orfeón Lamas had its origins at the January, 1928 Carnival. A group of amateur musicians, all disguised as Ukrainians, started to sing in the streets of Caracas, surprising people with their wonderful melodies. That group of young musicians was composed of Vicente Emilio Sojo, the brothers Emilio and José Antonio Calcaño, Juan Bautista Plaza, Miguel Ángel Calcaño and William Werner, all destined to become prestigious figures of the national musical culture. The idea to sing in a chorale occurred to them after making contact with a Ukraine vocal group, which was performing at the Caracas Municipal Theater in 1927; they decided to name the group in homage to José Ángel Lamas, a noted 19th-Century Venezuelan composer. This contact was the motivation for this young musicians to conform what later became the Orfeón Lamas. On March, 1929, they began to meet at the residence of José Antonio Calcaño, studying and singing pieces by Venezuelan composers. Later a group of female voices was added, completing the chorale. After a year of essays and arduous work, the Orfeón Lamas offered its first presentation at the Teatro Nacional, the National Theater of Caracas, on July 15, 1930.
The repertoire of the Orfeón Lamas was composed mainly of works by Venezuelan composers of the Santa Capilla Music School, disciples of Vicente Emilio Sojo, and of sacred compositions from Venezuelan composers who lived int the 18th and 19th centuries. Many of these colonial works only existed in old manuscripts, in bad conservation conditions, many of which had to be partially reconstructed. The sacred concerts of the Orfeón Lamas attained a great diffusion and popularity, in view of its interpretative merits and the rescue of this valuable, beloved repertoire. The Venezuela Symphony Orchestra often accompanied the Orfeón Lamas at the famous Sacred Concerts initiated by Sojo in 1933, performed regularly during several years (all Fridays of the Holy Week) at the Caracas Municipal Theater. The memorable sacred concert of March 31, 1933 at the Caracas Municipal Theater, which reunited more than one hundred singers in the choir along with the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra, was broadcast live through the "Broadcasting Caracas" to the whole country. In 1938, the Orfeón Lamas was invited to the celebrations of Bogotá´s IV Centenary. The chorale performed three successful concerts at the Columbus Theater of the Colombian Capital.
Maestro Sojo compiled and harmonized old Venezuelan aguinaldos and a great many folkloric songs for the Orfeón Lamas, conducting their performances for more than twenty years, achieving the feat of rescuing a sizable portion of the Venezuelan musical legacy. The Orfeón Lamas was a pioneer and seminal chorale of the mid-20th century's Venezuelan musical movement.