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This year’s annual spring concerts by the Berea College Concert
Choir and Chamber Singers, Stephen Bolster, conductor, Saturday, May
7 and Sunday, May 8, will feature instrumental accompaniment on piano,
organ and orchestra players from the Lexington Philharmonic and University
of Kentucky and Eastern Kentucky University orchestras. The performances
in Gray Auditorium of Presser Music Building, are scheduled for 8:00
p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, May 8 at 3:00 p.m.
There is no admission charge. However, free tickets for the performance
are required. Tickets will be available on weekdays at the Music Office
in Presser Music Building and at the Information Desk in the Alumni
Building beginning on Monday, May 2. Tickets will also be available
at the door before both performances. (Please note the change in concert
dates from those announced earlier in the year as April 30 and May
1.)
Berea College accompanists will be student Ryan Shirar on the piano,
and music faculty member and College organist John Courter on the organ.
The first half of the program will consist of several anthems by contemporary
composers, arranged for presentation according to various theological
topics, such as “Images of Christ,” “The Fall of
Jerusalem,” and “Songs of Assurance.” Several of
the pieces will feature Gray Auditorium’s new Holtcamp organ.
One of the works, “Nada te turbe” by Polish-American composer
Joan Szymko, is written for solo cello and choir, and is a setting
of a text by St. Teresa of Avila. It will feature cellist Mark Chambers,
music faculty member and Director of the Orchestra at EKU. The concluding
piece of the first half of the program is the Missa brevis Sancti Joannis
de Deo (St. John Brief Mass) by Franz Joseph Haydn, for string orchestra,
organ, choir, and soprano soloist. This short, 15-minute mass will
feature soprano Catherine Taylor.
Following intermission, the second part of the concert consists of
secular music about love and the power of love. The music comes from
various traditions, and is performed in several different languages.
The Chamber Singers begin the second part of the program with two songs
by Spanish composer Federico Garcia Lorca, sung in Spanish, and infused
with Spanish rhythms and sonorities. They continue with Five Hebrew
Love Songs by young American composer Eric Whitacre, for solo violin,
choir, and piano, featuring Jeremy Mulholland, violin. Mr. Mulholland
is a music faculty member at Eastern Kentucky University, where he
teaches violin. The pieces were originally written in 1996 as a set
of troubadour songs for piano, voice, and soprano to be performed by
the composer, his girlfriend, an Israeli soprano, named Hila Plitmann,
and a German violinist friend. Ms. Plitmann wrote the texts as a series
of “postcards” in her native tongue. Each of the movements
captures a moment that the two young lovers (now husband and wife)
shared together. The concluding selection of the group, You Are the
New Day is an English song made famous by England’s King’s
Singers.
The Concert Choir will then perform Come, O Come My Life’s Delight,
a contemporary madrigal-like composition by David Dickau, setting a
well-known text by Elizabethan writer Thomas Campion. Sudden Light
by Robert H. Young, sets the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rosetti and is
about the phenomenon of “déjà vu.” The group
of pieces concludes with a setting of the famous Robert Burns ballad, “Oh
My Luve’s Like a Red, Red Rose” by René Clausen,
scored for solo violin, solo cello, piano, and choir. Jeremy Mulholland,
Mark Chambers, and Ryan Shirar will provide the accompaniment. The
concert concludes with arrangements of two classic love songs by Cole
Porter, Friendship and In the Still of Night. Pianst Ryan Shirar will
be joined by a small instrumental jazz combo of students on the final
selection.
For more information, contact Dr. Stephen Bolster at (859) 985-3460.
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