The 28th season of the Southern Oregon Repertory Singers begins Sunday, October 27 at 3:00 with The British Are Coming, performed at the SOU Music Recital Hall in Ashland.
Celebrating 500 years of inspired British choral music, from Elizabethan madrigals to newly composed Scottish folk song arrangements by Jodi French, this concert welcomes kilt wearers and Union Jack wavers. The choir will sing Vaughan Williams’ glorious “Serenade to Music,” and his “Five Mystical Songs” will feature both choir and baritone soloist Dan Gibbs. “Serenade to Music” is a lush setting of one of Shakespeare’s most memorable descriptions of music and is justly one of VW’s most popular compositions. This piece will feature 16 of the singers in lovely, melodic solos. The “Five Mystical Songs” is a 25-minute cantata based on the metaphysical poems of George Herbert, and is alternately mystically ethereal and rousingly triumphant.
British choral music has a long and distinguished tradition, of which three highpoints are the Elizabethan madrigal, the Romantic English part song, and the incredible music being composed in our own time. All three of these time periods are well represented in this concert by some of Britain’s finest composers. Dr. French says, “I also wanted to explore the latest merging of ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ (a technique in more or less constant use since the cyclic masses of the early Renaissance) as exemplified in the wonderfully artistic settings of Scottish and English folksongs by James MacMillan and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Finally, I wanted to try to bypass the whole classical versus popular question by agreeing with Alban Berg who, when Gershwin felt embarrassed to play for him, said simply: ‘Mr. Gershwin, music is music, please play.’ In that spirit, we conclude our program with wonderful arrangements of music by Sting and the Beatles. Who says classical music can’t be popular too?”
The three Scottish Songs commissioned for the concert and arranged by Jodi French are haunting works for violin, piano, harp and women’s choir. They include Mary 
MacRae’s “God with Me Lying Down,” written in 1866 on the Isle of Harris, and Robert Burns’ “My Heart’s in the Highlands.” Jodi French’s setting of the Gaelic “Mingulay Boat Song” will be accompanied by Michaela Nuss on bagpipes. This powerful sea shanty for choir and bagpipes will transport all who hear it to the Scottish Isles!
A delicate set of madrigals will be performed by a small group from within the Repertory Singers, including its four 2013-2014 scholarship recipients. The concert will conclude with a classic Beatles’ song and Sting’s haunting “Valparaiso.”
Finally, the audience will get a taste of the thrill of the Last Night of the Proms, when the Royal Albert Hall in London resounds to the full blast of choir and audience joining together to sing “Jerusalem” and “God Save the Queen.” Everyone joins in!
Reserved Single tickets are $22, $25, and $29 and available at www.repsingers.org or by calling 541-552-0900. Season tickets are still available.
Posted October 10, 2013