More Top Picks Best Kids Bookshelves For Playrooms
player ready...City Voices community chorus will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams with “Music Rich and Strange.”
The program of selections by Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 22 at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Oak Park, and at 4 p.m. Oct. 23 at First United Church of Oak Park.
Director William Chin of Oak Park chose the name of the program because Vaughan Williams’ music is “surprisingly harmonically interesting and kind of challenging,” he said. “Some of the music is more deep than you might think of English music at that time.”
In addition, the phrase “rich and strange” appears in one selection from a piece called “Three Shakespeare Songs,” that the chorus will be performing.
Chin wanted to focus the concert on music of Vaughan Williams because, “He had a real passion and talent for choral music,” the director said. “A lot of his pieces do feature chorus. He was also very involved in sacred music. There are some iconic hymns that are attributed to him.”
The “Music Rich and Strange” concert will feature both sacred and secular music. That includes five English folk songs written by Vaughan Williams, who was interested in preserving folk music, Chin explained.
The program will also include selections by Gustav Holst, Gerald Finzi, and Herbert Howells. One particularly timely number is “White Flowering Days,” which Finzi composed for the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
Thirty-three singers will perform in the City Voices concert, which Chin considers a perfect size.
“It’s big enough that we can make a nice sound but it’s small enough that it’s a very intimate kind of process,” he said. “Everybody can feel like they’re an important part of the end product.”
The singers will be accompanied by organist Mark Sudeith, who performs with the Chicago Gargoyle Brass.
Alto Becki Streit of Oak Park has performed with City Voices since Chin started it in 2009. She grew up singing in church and school choruses in her hometown of Bloomington-Normal.
One of Streit’s favorite selections in the upcoming concert is “The Cloud-Capped Towers,” by Vaughan Williams, which she described as “incredibly evocative. It’s really wonderful to sing.”
Streit praised the benefits of choral music as something akin to a model of how the world should be with “people working together, people listening to each other, people being willing to help people with something they’re struggling with.”
Tom Hazinski of River Forest, who has been a member of City Voices for five years, is the bass section leader. “I joined because I wanted to expand my ability to sing choral music,” he noted. “I had a little bit of voice training. I took this as a learning opportunity and it’s turned out to be a really great experience.”
He noted that “‘Rich and Strange’ best applies to the three Shakespeare songs by Vaughan Williams. “Two of them are passages from ‘The Tempest’ and another is a passage from ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,'” he said.
“They capture the spirit of those dramas extremely well. They’re difficult and complicated pieces of music to sing. Those are the favorites of my pieces to sing.”
‘Music Rich and Strange’
When: Oct. 22-23
Where: Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, 611 Randolph St., Oak Park (Oct. 22) and First United Church of Oak Park, 848 Lake St., Oak Park (Oct. 23)
Tickets: $20; free to ages 18 and under
Information: cityvoiceschicago.org
More Top Picks Best Hunting Boots
Myrna Petlicki is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.