Siskiyou Singers present their Spring 2025 concerts, “Earth Song,” featuring music celebrating nature and admonitions to protect it.
Performances will be at 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, May 10 and 11, at Southern Oregon University’s Music Recital Hall. General admission is $25 ($5 for students and Oregon Trail Card holders). Tickets are available now online or can be purchased from choir members or at Music Coop or Paddington Station in Ashland in late March. Tickets are also available at the door.
The program begins with “Kasar Mie la Gaji (The Earth is Tired)” by Alberto Grau and “Break, Break, Break,” a Tennyson poem about lost love and set to music by choir Director Mark Reppert. The concert then strikes a hopeful note with “The Bluebird” by Charles Villiers Stanford; “O Lovely Night” by Johannes Brahms; the Renaissance madrigal “Sweet Suffolk Owl” by Thomas Vautor; and Eric Whitacre’s “Little Birds.” The final piece of the first half is the sunny “Away From the Roll of the Sea” by Allistar MacGillvray.
The second half begins with “The Lark In the Clear Air,” an Irish folk song arranged by Andrew Carter; it is the story of a young lover who is encouraged to pursue his love by the song of the lark. Another inspiring piece is “The Prow” by the young composer Matthew Hazzard, which tells of an exhilarating day out on the wild sea. We will then travel out to the prairie with a luscious arrangement by Mark Hayes of the old, familiar “Home on the Range”.
The program ends with a warning and hope. In a clever arrangement by Matt and Adam Podd, Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” tells us that “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” The final piece and namesake of the concert is “Earth Song” by Frank Ticheli, who tells us, “The scorched earth cries out in vain, O war and power you blind and blur,…[but] through darkness and strife I’ll sing!”