Cantata Singers’ 2011-12 Season Finale Salutes Five Composers With New England Ties
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“Section by section, Cantata Singers & Ensemble cannot be
beat. They are as good as choral
groups get.” – The Arts Fuse
Find out what's happening in Back Bayfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
What: Cantata Singers presents In
Thoughts, Our Dreams
When:
Saturday 5/12
at 8:00PM. (Pre-concert lecture with David Hoose at 7:00PM in the Keller
room.)
Where:
NEC’s Jordan
Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street, Boston, MA; T: Green to Symphony
Who: Cantata Singers and David
Hoose, music director and conductor
Tickets: General $17-$32/Students $10;
to purchase, contact Cantata Singers at cantatasingers.org or call 617.868.5885
Media
Contact: April
Thibeault/ 212.861.0990 april@amtpublicrelations.com
Boston, MA (For Release
4/10/12) – Cantata Singers completes
its 2011-12 season with an evening of works by 20th Century American
composers with strong local ties—four who rooted their careers in Boston, and
one, the masterful Aaron Copland, by way of a piece he wrote for Harvard’s
choir. The other featured composers are Harold Shapero, Earl Kim,
Charles Fussell and Rodney Lister, who will also be joining the chorus and
ensemble on stage as one of two featured piano soloists.
Cantata
Singers pays homage to these New England talents in the performances of Shapero’s Sonata for Piano
Four Hands (featuring guest pianists Lister and David Kopp), Kim’s Some
Thoughts on Keats and Coleridge and Scenes from a Movie, Part 3: The
Twenty-Sixth Dream, Fussell’s Invocation and Lister’s The
Annunciation. The program concludes with Copland’s In the
Beginning featuring acclaimed mezzo-soprano Janna Baty.
“In
a deep way, this is more than a concert of American music,” explains David
Hoose, Music Director and Conductor of Cantata Singers. “Each piece is
profoundly associated with the indigenous music, norms, and people of New
England. Each composer’s voice is uniquely his own, and all tied to a
thread of unfussy, clear and direct expression that reveals searching and
intimate feeling.”
The evening’s main event is Harold
Shapero’s Sonata for Piano Four Hands (1945), a formidable piece
known as one of the finest and most distinctly American of all four-hand piano
works. Featuring guest pianists David Kopp and fellow featured composer
Rodney Lister (both professors at Boston University), the Sonata approaches a
combination of Gershwin and Beethoven, the latter being a composer whose music
always influenced Shapero. Known for the cosmopolitan spirit of his music
that is classified primarily as neo-Classical, Shapero (b. 1920) is a native of
Massachusetts and studied at Harvard where as a senior he wrote the Sonata,
arguably the greatest work ever written by a Harvard undergraduate.
The highly elusive composer Earl
Kim (1920-1998) adds his harmonic treatment to remarkable poetry in both Some
Thoughts on Keats and Coleridge (1990) and Scenes from a Movie: The 26th
Dream (1996). A former professor at Harvard, Kim is greatly attracted
to the human voice – singing, speaking, and lack thereof through the
incorporation of significant silences. Kim’s song
cycle Some Thoughts on Keats and Coleridge uses fragments from four
poems by two of the greatest English Romantic poets, John Keats
and Samuel Coleridge. And,
the Scenes from a Movie, Part 3: The Twenty-Sixth Dream forms the last
part of a trilogy setting texts from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Aus dem Traumbuch.
Dream 26, set for baritone, chorus and two pianos, was composed in short
score in 1995, and then orchestrated for performance by Cantata Singers &
Ensemble in 1996.
Former Boston University
professor Charles Fussell (b. 1938) sets a May Sarton poem in
Invocation (1996). This piece exists
in three versions with two by David Hoose including one for this program for
chorus and two pianos. Performed by Cantata Singers back in 2005, the Boston
Globe described the work as “playing[ed] with the varieties of light and darkness that
inhabit May Sarton's poem. It opens with angular lines, and it reaches an
amazing fullness of sound before it settles back into a quiet ecstasy.”
Rodney
Lister’s Annunciation compiles a text from bits
and pieces of the section in W.H. Auden’s long Christmas poem, For The Time
Being, that speaks of the annunciation. It was written in 2002 for
the Master Singers of Lexington, MA. Lister (b.1951) studied at the New England
Conservatory (NEC) and Brandeis University and later taught at Boston
University and NEC’s Preparatory School.
Completing
the program is Aaron Copland’s In the Beginning (1947), an
extended a
cappella choral
work featuring soloist Janna Baty (mezzo-soprano). This challenging piece sets 38 verses from the Book
of Genesis in a single 16-minute, through-composed movement. Commissioned for the 1947 Harvard Symposium on Music
Criticism under the baton of Robert Shaw, it serves as one of the longest
continuous a cappella pieces ever written. Aaron
Copland (1900-1990) taught at Harvard and spent numerous summers at the
Berkshire Music Center (aka Tanglewood).
About Cantata Singers
Noted for compelling
programming, exceptional artistry, and eloquent performances, Cantata Singers
offers Boston-area audiences a range of musical performances, consistently
recognized as engaging, nuanced and penetrating.
With a repertoire that includes
works from the seventeenth century to the present day, Cantata Singers’
commitment and dedication to challenging programming, including the
commissioning of new works, was acknowledged in 1995 when the group was awarded
the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary
Music. The Boston Globe raves, “both chorus and orchestra give a
sense of total commitment in very demanding music… its precision and discipline
generates considerable emotional power…certainly
astonishing…a masterstroke.”
Cantata Singers’ 2011-2012 season
has been cited as being poignant, a revelation, imaginative, expressive,
superb, rich, magnificent and beautiful. According to The Arts
Fuse, the Cantata Singers presents, “a demanding but wonderful evening of
listening to rare performance in words and sound.”
Founded in 1964 to prepare and
present what was then a long-neglected repertoire — the cantatas of J.S. Bach —
Cantata Singers has since been led by such distinguished music directors as
John Harbison, John Ferris, and, now in his 29th year with the ensemble, David
Hoose. Under Mr. Hoose’s direction, the group has commissioned and premiered
twelve major choral-orchestral works, the first of which, John Harbison’s The
Flight Into Egypt, won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Music. The group
has recorded works of Bach, Schütz, Schein, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, as well
as the American composers Irving Fine, David Chaitkin, Seymour Shifrin, John
Harbison, Peter Child, and Charles Fussell. Cantata Singers’ recordings
and performances can be heard regularly on local and national radio, most often
on WGBH-FM (Boston).
Cantata Singers presents an
annual series of four main programs with its 44-voice chorus and chamber
orchestra with performances in the historic Jordan Hall at New England
Conservatory, and intimate venues in both Cambridge and Boston. cantatasingers.org
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