Welcome back!
We are so pleased you could join us for our first concerts since our performances of Elijah in March of 2020. It was a few days later that the lockdowns began, and we are grateful that those concerts took place as planned. Since then, all of us have had to navigate the uncertain times of pandemic-era life, including maintaining our ties over Zoom and trying to continue singing together remotely using experimental technology. As society has begun to emerge on the other side of the social restrictions, it has been an absolute thrill to be rehearsing together in one room again this fall. Singing with masks has been a challenge, but it is far superior to trying to make music remotely.
It was sometime in April, as vaccinations became widespread, that we began to see a glimmer of light at the end of this curious odyssey. We decided we should begin making plans for a 2021–2022 concert season, even though it was still unclear when and if we would be able to rehearse and perform this fall. With that in mind I began to think about what it would be like to return to once-common December activities. What had we missed doing last year when we couldn’t get out in public? These ruminations led to the theme of this concert, a celebration of the return of “Holiday Traditions.” We will focus on three group activities that were simply not available last year: Caroling, Concerts, and Clara—the girl whose dream after a family Christmas party is the genesis of The Nutcracker.
We begin with several medleys and arrangements of familiar Christmas carols. The arrangers of the first two medleys, Douglas E. Wagner, a Chicago native who now lives in Indianapolis, and Lloyd Larson, a central Illinois native who now lives in Minneapolis, are prolific and widely performed American composers, each with over 30 years in music. Wagner’s Here We Come A-Caroling is a celebration of British carols. Larson’s Noel Festival unites carols from around the world, playing on the commonality in the titles of Noël Nouvelet, a French carol; African Noel, an African folk song; and The First Noel, an English carol. Sit back and enjoy the comforting embrace of these familiar tunes!
Linda Kachelmeier hails from St. Paul, Minnesota, where she is part of the lively choral music scene in the Twin Cities, along with other composers on this program (Larson and Betinis). Her broad experience as a singer and choral conductor informs her lush but very singable compositions for vocal ensembles. She has received numerous grants and commissions as well as a McKnight Composer Fellowship. Her arrangements of Coventry Carol and God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen for six-part choir are a delight.
A resident of Kansas City, Missouri, Mark Hayes is another often-performed arranger, with over 1500 published works. After graduating magna cum laude from Baylor University in 1975, he began making a name for himself in the Contemporary Christian and Gospel music fields. His arrangements are known for their unique American sound, drawing from such diverse musical styles as gospel, jazz, pop, folk, and classical. His ability to shift styles is evident in his five International Carol Suites, of which we are performing the last two, back-to-back. We are singing Carols of Central and South America in their native Spanish. This suite ends on a calm and quiet note. From there, the Carols of North America suite jumps to Canada with the Huron Carol and leads eventually to a rousing conclusion with Go, tell it on the Mountain.
After intermission we’ll present a different kind of Christmas music—four a cappella pieces that you have likely never heard before, the sort of fare you might expect when attending an adventurous choral concert.
From a childhood that included little exposure to classical music, Jennifer Higdon found her way to playing percussion in her high school marching band and taught herself flute to play for the concert band. It was her flute teacher at Bowling Green University who first encouraged her to try composing. Eventually Higdon went on to earn a PhD in composition from the University of Pennsylvania under the tutelage of George Crumb and was a professor of composition at the Curtis Institute of Music from 1994 to 2021. She is known primarily for her orchestral music and has been commissioned by many of the major symphony orchestras around the country. She wrote her own text for Sing, Sing, composed in 1999 for the Philadelphia Singers, who are based in the city where she now resides.
Peace on Earth was commissioned by Bay Choral Guild in celebration of my 20th season as Artistic Director. It was intended to be premiered on our planned all-Dole program of June, 2020. Perhaps my biggest personal disappointment of the entire Covid era was the cancellation of those concerts. The program was to have featured many of my unaccompanied choral works and would have yielded a commercial recording that I hoped to use as a way to disseminate my music to a wider audience.
Like most original music for voices, Peace on Earth sets a text that appeals to the composer. In this case I had attended a concert directed by my long-time friend Lynne Morrow. On the program was a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Friede auf Erden, a pre-12-tone, harmonically advanced masterwork of the choral repertoire. But it was Lynne’s own translation of the poem by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer that caught my eye. The clear and direct version in modern English really spoke to me. With her permission I have set the translation, and I hope it speaks to you as well.
The Babe of Bethlehem is an early American “shape note” tune by William Walker, first published in 1835 as part of the collection Southern Harmony. Abbie Betinis was commissioned to create this arrangement for the inaugural concert of The Singers—Minnesota Choral Artists in 2004. As their director Matthew Culloton puts it, “She beautifully reworked this simple melody into vintage Betinis: shifting chords, many meters, and colorful moods. Follow along with the text and see how Abbie crafted her exciting arrangement perfectly around the story.”
Los Angeles-based Dale Trumbore is well on her way to becoming an “old favorite” among our singers and audiences. Her delightful and evocative Glorious, Glorious closes out our “Attending a Choral Concert” set. The piece came about as the result of a commissioning consortium of 16 high school, college, and professional choruses across the country. The text adapts excerpts from the final scene of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. As the composer describes it, “Bells chime in celebration of Christmas Day as Ebenezer Scrooge awakens from his encounter with the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come. No longer the miserly curmudgeon he used to be, Scrooge resolves to live in the ‘Past, the Present, and the Future’ and to bring the spirit of Christmas into his daily life.”
One of my favorite holiday activities is going to the ballet to see The Nutcracker. I’m a huge fan of the San Francisco Ballet. While I do attend concerts of the San Francisco Symphony and on occasion the San Francisco Opera, the San Francisco Ballet is the one organization I subscribe to every season. If you have never seen their version of The Nutcracker, I highly recommend it. I never fail to be charmed by the fact that it is set in 1915 San Francisco. The Christmas party of the first act takes place in a Pacific Heights mansion, and the Victorian era costumes are a joy to behold.
So I’m a sucker for Tchaikovsky’s brilliant score to begin with. But the addition of delightful texts makes this choral suite a sure-fire hit. The idea for a sung version came from the arranger Harry Simeone of the Fred Waring organization. Words were contributed by five different members of the group. The result is a “brightly melodic choral work,” which rapidly became one of the most frequently requested numbers on the Waring radio programs of the 1950s featuring Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians.
Thank you so much for venturing out to be with us this weekend! It is our great joy to be performing again, and we need you there to support us in the audience. We hope all of your Holiday Traditions can be fully enjoyed in the coming weeks. And we look forward to seeing you at our other concerts this season, on the first weekends of March and June, 2022.
We are so pleased you could join us for our first concerts since our performances of Elijah in March of 2020. It was a few days later that the lockdowns began, and we are grateful that those concerts took place as planned. Since then, all of us have had to navigate the uncertain times of pandemic-era life, including maintaining our ties over Zoom and trying to continue singing together remotely using experimental technology. As society has begun to emerge on the other side of the social restrictions, it has been an absolute thrill to be rehearsing together in one room again this fall. Singing with masks has been a challenge, but it is far superior to trying to make music remotely.
It was sometime in April, as vaccinations became widespread, that we began to see a glimmer of light at the end of this curious odyssey. We decided we should begin making plans for a 2021–2022 concert season, even though it was still unclear when and if we would be able to rehearse and perform this fall. With that in mind I began to think about what it would be like to return to once-common December activities. What had we missed doing last year when we couldn’t get out in public? These ruminations led to the theme of this concert, a celebration of the return of “Holiday Traditions.” We will focus on three group activities that were simply not available last year: Caroling, Concerts, and Clara—the girl whose dream after a family Christmas party is the genesis of The Nutcracker.
We begin with several medleys and arrangements of familiar Christmas carols. The arrangers of the first two medleys, Douglas E. Wagner, a Chicago native who now lives in Indianapolis, and Lloyd Larson, a central Illinois native who now lives in Minneapolis, are prolific and widely performed American composers, each with over 30 years in music. Wagner’s Here We Come A-Caroling is a celebration of British carols. Larson’s Noel Festival unites carols from around the world, playing on the commonality in the titles of Noël Nouvelet, a French carol; African Noel, an African folk song; and The First Noel, an English carol. Sit back and enjoy the comforting embrace of these familiar tunes!
Linda Kachelmeier hails from St. Paul, Minnesota, where she is part of the lively choral music scene in the Twin Cities, along with other composers on this program (Larson and Betinis). Her broad experience as a singer and choral conductor informs her lush but very singable compositions for vocal ensembles. She has received numerous grants and commissions as well as a McKnight Composer Fellowship. Her arrangements of Coventry Carol and God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen for six-part choir are a delight.
A resident of Kansas City, Missouri, Mark Hayes is another often-performed arranger, with over 1500 published works. After graduating magna cum laude from Baylor University in 1975, he began making a name for himself in the Contemporary Christian and Gospel music fields. His arrangements are known for their unique American sound, drawing from such diverse musical styles as gospel, jazz, pop, folk, and classical. His ability to shift styles is evident in his five International Carol Suites, of which we are performing the last two, back-to-back. We are singing Carols of Central and South America in their native Spanish. This suite ends on a calm and quiet note. From there, the Carols of North America suite jumps to Canada with the Huron Carol and leads eventually to a rousing conclusion with Go, tell it on the Mountain.
After intermission we’ll present a different kind of Christmas music—four a cappella pieces that you have likely never heard before, the sort of fare you might expect when attending an adventurous choral concert.
From a childhood that included little exposure to classical music, Jennifer Higdon found her way to playing percussion in her high school marching band and taught herself flute to play for the concert band. It was her flute teacher at Bowling Green University who first encouraged her to try composing. Eventually Higdon went on to earn a PhD in composition from the University of Pennsylvania under the tutelage of George Crumb and was a professor of composition at the Curtis Institute of Music from 1994 to 2021. She is known primarily for her orchestral music and has been commissioned by many of the major symphony orchestras around the country. She wrote her own text for Sing, Sing, composed in 1999 for the Philadelphia Singers, who are based in the city where she now resides.
Peace on Earth was commissioned by Bay Choral Guild in celebration of my 20th season as Artistic Director. It was intended to be premiered on our planned all-Dole program of June, 2020. Perhaps my biggest personal disappointment of the entire Covid era was the cancellation of those concerts. The program was to have featured many of my unaccompanied choral works and would have yielded a commercial recording that I hoped to use as a way to disseminate my music to a wider audience.
Like most original music for voices, Peace on Earth sets a text that appeals to the composer. In this case I had attended a concert directed by my long-time friend Lynne Morrow. On the program was a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Friede auf Erden, a pre-12-tone, harmonically advanced masterwork of the choral repertoire. But it was Lynne’s own translation of the poem by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer that caught my eye. The clear and direct version in modern English really spoke to me. With her permission I have set the translation, and I hope it speaks to you as well.
The Babe of Bethlehem is an early American “shape note” tune by William Walker, first published in 1835 as part of the collection Southern Harmony. Abbie Betinis was commissioned to create this arrangement for the inaugural concert of The Singers—Minnesota Choral Artists in 2004. As their director Matthew Culloton puts it, “She beautifully reworked this simple melody into vintage Betinis: shifting chords, many meters, and colorful moods. Follow along with the text and see how Abbie crafted her exciting arrangement perfectly around the story.”
Los Angeles-based Dale Trumbore is well on her way to becoming an “old favorite” among our singers and audiences. Her delightful and evocative Glorious, Glorious closes out our “Attending a Choral Concert” set. The piece came about as the result of a commissioning consortium of 16 high school, college, and professional choruses across the country. The text adapts excerpts from the final scene of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. As the composer describes it, “Bells chime in celebration of Christmas Day as Ebenezer Scrooge awakens from his encounter with the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come. No longer the miserly curmudgeon he used to be, Scrooge resolves to live in the ‘Past, the Present, and the Future’ and to bring the spirit of Christmas into his daily life.”
One of my favorite holiday activities is going to the ballet to see The Nutcracker. I’m a huge fan of the San Francisco Ballet. While I do attend concerts of the San Francisco Symphony and on occasion the San Francisco Opera, the San Francisco Ballet is the one organization I subscribe to every season. If you have never seen their version of The Nutcracker, I highly recommend it. I never fail to be charmed by the fact that it is set in 1915 San Francisco. The Christmas party of the first act takes place in a Pacific Heights mansion, and the Victorian era costumes are a joy to behold.
So I’m a sucker for Tchaikovsky’s brilliant score to begin with. But the addition of delightful texts makes this choral suite a sure-fire hit. The idea for a sung version came from the arranger Harry Simeone of the Fred Waring organization. Words were contributed by five different members of the group. The result is a “brightly melodic choral work,” which rapidly became one of the most frequently requested numbers on the Waring radio programs of the 1950s featuring Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians.
Thank you so much for venturing out to be with us this weekend! It is our great joy to be performing again, and we need you there to support us in the audience. We hope all of your Holiday Traditions can be fully enjoyed in the coming weeks. And we look forward to seeing you at our other concerts this season, on the first weekends of March and June, 2022.
