Dear Singers
I hope your summer has been enjoyable. Some of us are still basking in the glory of our Italian Tour and we are still enjoying the memories of a wonderful spring concert. It was a smashing success. I am still hearing accolades about the beauty and significance of our performance.
This year’s fall season will be different from others in the past. Because of some scheduling problems we will not be holding our concerts on the traditional second weekend of December. Instead, our major concerts will be at SOU Recital Hall on January 18 and 19. In addition, we will do a light holiday concert geared to families on December 14, also at the SOU Recital Hall. I hope that the lemons that were thrown at us can be made into lemonade with these new dates.
Our upcoming concert will feature two concert masterpieces accompanied by a full orchestra. Antonio Vivaldi’s Gloria, RV 589 is a classic of choral literature with good reason. This expressive baroque classic features a wonderful range of emotions and beautiful choral counterpoint. We will sing the choruses from the Gloria. The piece is sure to send our audiences out the door humming these delightful melodies.
Following the Gloria we will sing one of Leonard Bernstein’s most loved and most performed works, The Chichester Psalms. The major motion picture “Maestro”, a loose biography of Leonard Bernstein, one of the most significant classical musicians of the 20th century, featured parts of this great work. This exciting and challenging music will delight us, it will inform us, and it will move us! The Psalms represented are…
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Psalm 108 (“Awake psaltery and harp”)
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Psalm 100 (“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord”)
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Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd”) in which we will hear young David singing with his harp.
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Psalm 2 (“Why do the nations rage?”)
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Psalm 131 (“Lord, my heart is not haughty”)
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Psalm 133 (“Behold how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity”), definitely a message for our time.
The second half of the concert is a sharp contrast to the first. We will sing pop classics from the last 50 years. We will sing wonderful choral arrangements of The Beatles (of course), Billy Joel, and Lin-Manuel Miranda among others. This should provide a light dessert to the meat and potatoes of the first half. I have stolen an idea from one of the choirs we heard at the Alta Pusteria International Choral Festival–we will end the concert with choir and audience singing “Hey Jude.”
YouTube video links for most of this music are at the bottom of this letter and also on the website, siskiyousingers.org. For those who would like to get to work on the music before our first rehearsal, PDFs will be on the website soon. The password to the members section is “silentnight” (no quotes).
Our concerts will be January 18 and 19 at SOU Recital Hall. The free, light holiday concert will be December 14 at 3:00 PM. We hope to encourage those who have not been regular Siskiyou Singers concert attenders to come and see what we are all about.
Rehearsals will be held on Tuesdays at Ashland United Methodist Church. We will rehearse from 7:00 PM to 9:30 PM beginning with our first rehearsal on September 3.
Be sure to invite your choral-singing friends to audition. They can audition at 6:30 pm on September 3 or 10 or by making arrangements with me before our first rehearsal. Please have them send an email to me at markreppert@gmail.com to schedule an audition time.
I am so excited about this concert. It gives us an opportunity to sing two classic choral works and enjoy doing them with our friends! I look forward to seeing all of you on September 3.
Mark
Vivaldi Gloria
Chichester Psalms
Boogie Fever
Blackbird
By the way, we will not whistle.
We Don’t Talk About Bruno
Lullabye
Baba Yetu
Hey Jude
This is how our audience will respond.