The Estey Organ Museum and the First Baptist Church are once again pleased to host the Pioneer Valley Symphony Chorus in Brattleboro in a special springtime performance on March 14 at 3pm at First Baptist Church. The concert is open to the public with a $5 suggested donation at the door.
Terry Larsen will conduct the Chorus and Chamber Singers in a lively collection of American choral gems by William Billings, Alice Parker, Paula Kimper, Edwin Earle Ferguson, William Dawson, Cecil Effinger and Aaron Copland. The chorus will be accompanied by Grant Moss, piano, and a woodwind quintet from the Pioneer Valley Symphony Orchestra.
One local highlight of the program features the Choral Suite from Paula Kimper's new opera "The Captivation of Eunice Williams," inspired by the true story of a seven-year-old girl who was captured in the Deerfield raid of February 1704 and chose to remain a Mohawk. Kimper's lyrical score draws upon a variety of musical styles, from early American church hymns to Iroquois traditional dances.
Other selections complete the theme of the program, entitled "American Idylls."
William Billings' "Wake Ev'ry Breath" is sung in canon (the melody is imitated by successive entrances of voices). Many of Billings works were well known and sung by defiant American colonists during the American Revolution.
Alice Parker in her cantata "And Sing Eternally" employs shape-note hymns composed from 1802-1824. A graduate of Smith College and the Julliard School of Music, she has composed more than 400 works. For years, Alice Parker collaborated with choral master Robert Shaw.
"Ye Followers of the Lamb" is a riveting setting by Edwin Earle Ferguson of a Shaker hymn. Ferguson's arrangement of this hymn generates a relentless, hypnotic drive that evokes the scene of a staid and civilized people being roused by religious fervor to abandon the decorum of day-to-day life to dance for their god.
William Dawson, one of the most important African American composers of the 20th Century, arranged folk songs, hymns, and spirituals for the Tuskegee Choir. "Ain'a That Good News," "Soon-ah Will Be Done," and "Ev'ry Time I Feel the Spirit," are now standards of the great body of American music known as the Spiritual.
Cecil Effinger's "Wood" and "No Mark," are settings of poems by Colorado Poet Laureate Thomas Hornsby Ferril that present personal and very human introspections about life, death, war, and love imbedded in the overwhelming grandeur and beauty of the landscape of the American West.
The Copeland pieces "The Promise of Living" and "Stomp Your Foot" are taken from his opera "The Tender Land". Set in the rural American Midwest of a bygone day, these pieces extol the virtues of hard work, self-dependence, family, and the inter-dependence of neighbors.
Awe-struck reverence for nature and profound humility in the face of that grand scheme pervade Samuel Barber's treatment of the James Agee poem "Sure on this Shining Night." This song and the famous "Adagio for Strings" are two of the most popular and oft performed of Barber's works.
More information can be found on the Pioneer Valley Symphony and Chorus website at: http://www.pvso.org
You can find out more about the Estey Organ Museum by visiting www.esteyorganmuseum.org