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Hudson Chorale (Rehearsals in Pleasantville) Welcomes New Members in January (1/29/18)

  
Monday, January 29, 2018  06:00pm  07:00pm
   
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Come sing with Westchester’s largest community chorus! Hudson Chorale is welcoming new members in all voice parts (SATB) to join them for an exciting June 2018 concert that will appeal to choral singers of a wide range of musical preferences. Singer-friendly auditions will begin on Monday, January 29, 2018, by appointment, from 6:00 – 7:00 pm prior to the first rehearsal. Rehearsals take place on Monday evenings from 7:15 – 9:45 p.m. at the Pleasantville Presbyterian Church, 400 Bedford Rd, Pleasantville, NY. To receive additional information and/or to schedule a time for an audition, contact Jeanne Wygant at or call 914-478-0074.

The concert program, entitled A Celebration of America, will be performed on Friday, June 1 and Sunday, June 3, 2018, and features three American composers and their works: Vincent Persichetti’s Celebrations, along with highlights from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, plus the world premiere of two original commissioned works by composer Robert Convery. Both performances will be at the Pleasantville Presbyterian Church.

Music Director Maestro Ira Spaulding is a choral conductor, singer and master class instructor whose career spans 40 years of performance in more than 60 countries. He is currently Professor of Vocal and Choral Music at City College of New York and maintains a career abroad as a singer and conductor. The chorus’ Accompanist/Assistant Music Director, David Baranowski, is a household name to choral singers in the Westchester area due to his virtuosity on piano, keyboard, organ and harpsichord.

To learn more about the chorus, visit the website at www.HudsonChorale.org.

Direct link to complete auditions information:

http://hudsonchorale.org/hudson-chorale-calls-for-new-members-in-january/
 
Location     Pleasantville Presbyterian Church, 400 Bedford Rd, Pleasantville, NY
Contact      Jeanne Wygant at or call 914-478-0074
Extra Info    Born in Philadelphia, Vincent Persichetti was a teacher and pianist in addition to being a composer. He developed new ideas in composition which were distinctly his and which he readily passed on to his students at Juilliard, the most notable of which was Phillip Glass. Persichetti’s Celebrations for chorus and wind ensemble (1966) is a very moving, joyous, large-scale choral setting of nine of Walt Whitman’s poems, culminating in the poet’s Song of Myself.

Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess is probably the most famous and successful American opera of the 20th century. The Highlights include playful, dramatic, touching and humorous pieces from this uniquely American masterpiece, each one a story unto itself. Chorus members will be rhythmically challenged to bring forth the exciting musical sounds of Catfish Row.

If you’ve never heard of Robert Convery, you will never forget him after you’ve learned to sing two works he was commissioned to write for Hudson Chorale. Born in Wichita and currently residing in New York, this student of Vincent Persichetti has composed works of every category: six one-act operas, thirty-four cantatas, twelve song cycles, more than two hundred songs for voice and piano, as well as numerous non-vocal orchestral and chamber works. Convery is known for his clean and unadorned style which appeals to the very soul of the listener. In addition to Hudson Chorale, he has received commissioning grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, Opera America, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Reader’s Digest Fund.

When asked to classify his two commissioned compositions, Convery replied: “I call Sappho, 620 B. C. a ‘mini-cantata’ because it is in one movement which divides into seven small sections. This mini-cantata acts as the olive before the martini, which is Two Cows. I call Two Cows a ‘short cantata’ because it is in two movements, with a two-note bridge on the word ‘moo’ between the two movements.” The inspiration for both works comes from poetry written centuries apart.

Sappho, 620 B.C. is full of passion and intense beauty, both musically and poetically. The text for the work is a combination of seven poetic fragments by Sappho, an ancient Greek woman devoted to Aphrodite (goddess of love, beauty, pleasure and procreation) and Eros (god of love and physical attraction). “I added Sappho’s birthdate to the title to pull the passion into perspective,” says Convery. “It is so delicious that Sappho, the inventor of lyric poetry, expressed such intense, eternally vibrant beauty…so long ago.”

It is the rare person who does not derive pleasure from the sight of cows being cows, quietly doing the tasks assigned to them by nature. Two Cows is a two-part composition containing text from three simple yet delightful pastoral poems: the text of the first movement, The Moo-Cow-Moo, is a poem by Edmund Vance Cooke (b. 1866) that was very popular in the early 1900’s; Pretty Cow, the second movement, is a duet between poems by Robert Louis Stevenson (b. 1850) and Ann Taylor (b. 1782). Convery concludes from seeing them side by side that Stevenson used Taylor’s poem, The Pretty Cow, as the model for his own cow-themed work, The Friendly Cow, making them ideal duet mates. As an example of Convery’s sense of humor, he ascribes the text of the bridge between the two pieces (two notes on the word moo) to “…Flossy, Bessy or Mrs. O’Leary.”

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