Music of the Baroque celebrates with Holiday Brass & Choral Concert

A sacred soundscape, highly energetic with dissonance and contemplative harmonies, and the ability to transport people to another dimension, as only music can do.

Music of the Baroque celebrates the holiday season with their Holiday Brass & Choral Concerts, “A Rose in Winter,” conducted by Andrew Megill and performed Dec. 15 through 18, in River Forest, Chicago’s Old Town, Winnetka and Evanston locations.

Saturday’s performance at Faith, Hope and Charity, Catholic Church on Linden Street in Winnetka, featured a chorus of 26 along with eight brass musicians in an 80-minute program with no interruption of applause from beginning to end.

According to Music of the Baroque executive director Declan McGovern, performing four repeated concert programs during the holidays has become a long-standing Chicago area tradition since 1979.

“The music creates an uplifting celebration, marking the birth of Christ and the story of the nativity through symbolism and imagery,” McGovern said. “The concert is a journey in time travel, that sends us way back, to before the Baroque period, to 16th century renaissance, when religious texts were turned into musical masterpieces.”

This year’s concert program included works by Felix Mendelssohn, Giovanni Gabrieli, and Johann Sebastian Bach and others.

Principal Trumpet Barbara Butler, an internationally known professor of trumpet at Rice University, has performed in the Holiday Brass & Choral Concert since it began.

“When you sit and open your ears and your heart to this music, it will transport you,” Butler said. “It will unlock your emotions because of its purity.”

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Soloist Allison Selby Cook has been the associate music director and cantor at Faith, Hope and Charity, Catholic Church in Winnetka for 12 years in addition to being a professional singer and actor.

“When I am singing this music, I am intent on connecting the audience to the texts, I want them to experience the text through the music,” Cook said.

Julie Ward of Evanston attended Saturday’s concert with family.

“We are fans of classical music and attend the symphony and the opera regularly,” Ward said. “What a wonderful holiday program that allows us to experience such a high caliber ensemble in a more intimate concert setting.”

On their website, Music of the Baroque is described as a professional chorus and orchestra devoted to the performance of eighteenth-century works.

Over the past four decades, Music of the Baroque has presented premiere performances of many early masterpieces, including Monteverdi’s operas and 1610 Vespers, Georg Philipp Telemann’s Day of Judgment, Mozart’s Idomeneo, and numerous Handel operas and oratorios. The ensemble has drawn particular praise throughout its history for its performances of the major choral and orchestral works of J.S. Bach and Handel, Mozart, and Haydn.

A digitally recorded version of Saturday’s concert will be available on the Music of the Baroque website: www.baroque.org for a limited time.

“We get to perform this music that comes from centuries ago — which is still as relevant today as it was back then, and still able to breakdown barriers and lift the human spirit,” McGovern said.

Gina Grillo is a freelance reporter with Pioneer Press.