Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Westminster Choir College

Westminster Arts Week: Princeton & Lawrenceville

The influence of Rider University’s Westminster College of the Arts will be felt here, there, and everywhere over the course of the coming week.

Westminster Choir College will present its annual art song festival tonight and tomorrow. This year’s overarching theme will be “Songs of Fin-de-Siècle Paris and Vienna.” Lecture recitals will begin at 7:30 p.m. at Bristol Chapel on the college’s Princeton campus.

Repertoire will include works composed between 1885 and 1915 by Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, Ernest Chausson, Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg and Alexander Zemlinsky.

A free symposium will be held there tomorrow from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Westminster Choir College students will perform early songs of Webern.

Also on Saturday at 7:30 p.m., and also free, Westminster Conservatory of Music faculty members will present a concert of French woodwind repertoire as part of the institution’s “Kaleidoscope Chamber Series.” The program, titled “Le Conservatoire: The Paris Conservatory and Its Impact on Wind Performance,” will take place at Gill Memorial Chapel on the Rider University campus in Lawrenceville.

On Sunday at 3 p.m., Westminster Conservatory will provide a showcase of its community ensembles and students at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium. Participants will include the Westminster Community Orchestra and the Princeton Charter School/Westminster Conservatory Youth Orchestra, both conducted by Ruth Ochs; the Westminster Conservatory Children’s Chorus, conducted by Patricia Thel and Yvonne Macdonald; and winners of the Westminster Conservatory Concerto Competition: Marie Louise James, oboe; Alexis Peart, soprano; and Matthew Yuan, clarinet.

Finally, Westminster Choir will join the Westminster Festival Orchestra for a concert of Beethoven choral masterworks on March 4 at 8p.m. Joe Miller, Westminster Choir College’s director of choral activities, will conduct the Mass in C Major, and Drew Petersen will be the soloist in the popular “Choral Fantasy” for piano, chorus and orchestra. The program, titled “Romantic Genius,” will be performed at Princeton Meadow Church and Event Center.

Find out details in my article in today’s Trenton Times. Go, Westminster!

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2016/02/classical_music_westminster_ch_1.html

PHOTOS: Westminster Conservatory competition winners (clockwise from left) Marie Louise James, Alexis Peart, and Matthew Yuan

February 26, 2016
Bach Concerts at Princeton Seminary This Weekend

This weekend will be bookended by two concerts of music by Johann Sebastian Bach. Princeton Theological Seminary’s Miller Chapel will resound with the complete Leipzig Chorales, presented by students of Westminster Choir College of Rider University on Friday at 7:30 p.m. Then the Dryden Ensemble will perform a selection of sublime cantatas at the same venue on Sunday at 3 p.m.

The Dryden program is one of many that had to be rescheduled thanks to Winter Storm Jonas, which threw the region into chaos and had the effect of silencing area music-making.

For its annual Bach Cantata Fest, the group will present an assortment of recitatives and arias, including selections from Cantata 36, “Schwingt freudig euch empor” (“Soar joyfully upwards”); Cantata 78, “Jesu, der du meine Seele” (“Jesus, You, who my soul”); and Cantata 159, “Sehet, wir gehn hinauf gen Jerusalem” (“Behold, let us go up to Jerusalem”). Also featured will be the complete Cantata 82, “Ich habe genug” (“It is enough), sung by guest baritone William Sharp.

The Dryden ensemble performs on period instruments. The Westminster organ concert will include student singers.

Find out more about both events in my article in today’s Trenton Times:

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2016/02/classical_music_westminster_ch.html

February 19, 2016
Princeton Vocal Arts Abound This Week

If you are an admirer of the vocal arts, there is much to enjoy over the next nine days, with concerts being given by the Capital Singers of Trenton (tonight at 7:30, at St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church in Princeton), Princeton Girlchoir (a benefit concert at Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton, tomorrow at 5), Westminster Williamson Voices (at Westminster Choir College’s Bristol Chapel, tomorrow at 8 p.m.), Westminster Choir (also at Bristol Chapel, Sunday at 3), Westminster Kantorei (at Bristol on 11/20 at 8), The Dryden Ensemble (an all-Purcell program at Princeton Theological Seminary’s Miller Chapel, on 11/21 at 7:30, and Trinity Episcopal Church in Solebury, Pa., on 11/22 at 3), and Westminster Jubilee Singers (at Bristol, on 11/22 at 7).

The Princeton Girlchoir will join The Princeton Singers for the New Jersey premiere of Steven Sametz’s “A Child’s Requiem,” written in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. On the same program will be Vaughan Williams’ poignant “Serenade to Music” (at Princeton Meadow Church and Event Center, on 11/21 at 8 p.m.).

It’s a lot to take in. Find out more about it in my article in today’s Trenton Times:

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2015/11/classical_music_bevy_of_concer.html

November 13, 2015
Glass & Moran Reunited in NJ This Weekend

Two old cronies are brought together again, if only in my newspaper article.

Composer Robert Moran enlisted Philip Glass to be one of 25 composers to participate in “The Waltz Project” in the late 1970s. The project was documented on an album released by Nonesuch Records in 1981.

In 1985, the two collaborated on an opera, “The Juniper Tree,” after a tale by the Brothers Grimm (and a very grim one at that), the composers divvying up its four acts between them. In the meantime, Moran set about arranging 21 variations, for various combinations of instruments, on Glass’ “Modern Love Waltz,” which have also been recorded.

On Saturday at 7:30 p.m., Glass’ “Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra” will open the New Jersey Capital Philharmonic Orchestra season, at the Trenton War Memorial. The soloists will be Jonathan Haas (for whom Glass wrote the work) and William Trigg (who has performed with the Philip Glass Ensemble). Also on the program will be Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5.

By coincidence, on Saturday morning, from 10:00 to 1:00, Moran will preside over a workshop hosted by Westminster Conservatory Honors Music Program. The composer will lead the HMP community on a freewheeling journey through his creative process, seasoned with personal anecdotes, audio and video illustrations, advice to young composers, and what promises to be lively discussion, offered up in a kind of master class setting.

The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place at Hillman Performance Hall, The Marion Buckelew Cullen Center, at Westminster Choir College of Rider University in Princeton. Refreshments will be provided.

Moran studied with Hans Erich Apostel in Vienna and then with Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio at Mills College. He gained notoriety in the late 1960s and early ‘70s through a series of performance pieces incorporating entire cities, including San Francisco, Bethlehem, Pa. and Graz, Austria. These involved tens of thousands of performers.

His many stage works include “Desert of Roses,” written for Houston Grand Opera, and, in 2011, “Alice” composed for the Scottish Ballet.

For the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, he was commissioned to write a work for the youth chorus of Trinity Wall Street, the so-called “Ground Zero” church in Lower Manhattan. “Trinity Requiem,” scored for children’s chorus, four cellos, harp and organ, offers a similar brand of solace to that conjured in the 19th century masterwork by Gabriel Fauré.

With Robert Moran, you never know what you’re going to get. In his more puckish moments, he might write for harpsichord and electric frying pan. But then there are times when his natural gift for lyricism will melt your heart.

Read more about it in my article in today’s Trenton Times:

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2015/10/classical_music_njcp_opening_s.html

October 23, 2015
Princeton Festival’s Porgy & Bess Review

If you’re interested, here’s my review of The Princeton Festival’s fine “Porgy and Bess” in today’s Trenton Times. Remaining performances take place at McCarter Theatre Center tonight at 8 and Sunday afternoon at 3.

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2014/06/review_princeton_festivals_por.html

Also, Westminster Choir College’s CoOPERAtive Program is offering three weeks worth of recitals and master classes involving emerging artists at Bristol Chapel and the Princeton Regional Schools Performing Arts Center. All events are free and open to the public. You can find out more about it by following the link. (As is so often the case, those peculiar, online paragraph breaks are not mine!)

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2014/06/westminster_choir_colleges_coo.html

PHOTO: Kenneth Overton, as Jake, sings “A Woman is a Sometime Thing”

June 27, 2014

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