Culture

The spring session of the Brattleboro Women’s Chorus will begin on Wednesday evening March 2 from 6:30-8:30 at 118 Elliot, or on Thursday March 3 from 10 am – noon at Centre Congregational Church. New and former singers are encouraged to join this spring as we prepare for a May concert of compositions and arrangements by our founder and conductor, Becky Graber.

The first two rehearsals are open to anyone who would like to come and check out chorus for the first time. All women and girls over 10 are welcome, and there are no auditions. Reading music is optional since music is taught by rote and by ear with part recordings available. While many singers enjoy performing, some prefer to sing weekly and not participate in the concerts at the end of the session (Mother’s Day weekend, May 7 & 8).

Friends of Music at Guilford seeks additional voices for its Chambers Singers in preparation for its yearly “A Cappella à la Carte” event and 50th birthday party on Saturday, June 25, at a hilltop property in Guilford. The gathering will include a brief annual meeting, a festive potluck meal, and concert sets by the Singers and the Singcrony women’s quartet. Other music-making may emerge as plans develop. The Chamber Singers will perform love songs by Dowland, Elgar, Holst, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Young & Heyman, Healey Willan, and the group’s director, Tom Baehr; one or two others may be added. Rehearsals begin Monday, February 22, from 7 to 9 p.m. at Guilford Community Church. Contact Baehr at (802) 387-2796 or tombaehr@myfairpoint.net with questions or to join the group.

Guilford, Vt. – Friends of Music at Guilford, now in its 50th Anniversary Season, presents the second of three programs featuring Bolivian Baroque music from an archive of nearly 13,000 pages of recently collected manuscripts. The “Barroco Boliviano” concert begins at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, February 20, in the sanctuary of Guilford Community Church, just a mile south on Rt. 5 from Exit 1 off I-91 in Brattleboro.

This treasure trove of Baroque-era manuscripts was a sort of Holy Grail for musicologist Fr. Piotr Nawrot, a native of Poland who arrived in Bolivia in the early 1990s after spending a few years in Guatemala. He traveled the Bolivian countryside seeking out church elders with carefully hidden or, in some cases, unfortunately neglected materials first composed and performed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Spaniards took over that area of the Inca Empire, and then forgotten when the Spanish colonial period ended in the early 19th century. Fr. Nawrot has spent many years preparing a significant amount of this music for publication and performance by a new generation of musicians, both in Bolivia and around the world.

The VJC welcomes Steve Davis Sextet to perform on Saturday, February 13th in a concert celebrating the music of trombonist J. J. Johnson. Featured artists in Davis’s sextet include one of bebop’s foremost elder statesmen on the piano, Harold Mabern as well as the formidable tenor saxophonist, Scott Mullett. The other musicians who comprise this sextet include Josh Bruneau (trumpet), Harold Mabern (piano), Nat Reeves (bass) and Joe Farnsworth (drums).

This concert was originally scheduled to highlight saxophonist Eric Alexander who gracefully bowed out to accept an extended European tour. This turn of events has evolved into a wonderful opportunity for the Vermont Jazz Center whose audience will now experience the exciting repertoire and tight arrangements of J. J. Johnson, one of the greatest trombonists in the history of jazz, interpreted by an all-star band. Saturday Night Live trombonist Steve Turre put it succinctly when he stated: