Consort Singers - Love & Loss

           Lauren McLaren’s For My Father, a winner in the Los Robles Master Chorale’s first Young Artist Choral Composers Competition, will receive its world premiere at the Consort Singers’ April 17th and May 1st performances of Love & Loss. The 26-voice chamber ensemble, under the direction of LRMC Artistic Director Lesley Leighton, will also sing an eclectic range of vocal music spanning the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries.

            Set to three texts drawn from The Tempest, King Lear, and Hamlet, McLaren’s work showcases the ensemble’s vocal flexibility and stylistic acumen with constantly changing meters, tonal centers and emotional renderings of the Shakespearean texts. McLaren, a former member of the Trojan Marching Band, graduated with high honors from the USC Thornton School of Music in 2010 and is already making her mark as a composer.

            Other concert highlights will include American traditional songs arranged by Norman Luboff, selections from O, Mistress Mine: A Garland of Elizabethan Poetry by Swedish composer Nils Lindberg, and works written or arranged by Moses Hogan, C.V. Stanford, Josef Rheinberger, Philip Wilby, James Mulholland, and Lesley Leighton.

           Los Robles Master Chorale launched its Young Artist Choral Composition Competition as part of its dedication to the development of new choral music and the work of young choral composers. The annual competition is open to southern California composers 35 years old or younger.

           Love & Loss will be performed Sunday, April 17 at 4 pm at The Church of the
Epiphany, 5450 Churchwood Drive,  Oak Park. The program will be repeated Sunday, May 1 at 4 pm at Church of the Foothills, 6279 Foothill Road, Ventura. Both concerts will feature a pre-concert conversation at 3 pm and a post-concert reception.

            Advance tickets are $22, $20 for students and seniors, with all tickets $25 the day of the concert. For additional information or to purchase tickets, visit www.losroblesmasterchorale.org or call 805/526-SING (7464) or 805/990-3006.