This year, the Concert Choir’s concert theme is Oh! The Places You’ll Go. For the first time in over a decade, the Concert Choir will be traveling abroad – to Hungary and the Czech Republic– and the places on our itinerary include Budapest, Brno, and Prague! Musically, our concert repertoire is organized in a way that seeks to recognize and honor the musical heritage of the countries we will be visiting while simultaneously sharing America’s distinctive musical culture. For instance, we will be performing two selections in the Czech language by renowned Romantic-era composer Antonin Dvořák, and we will be singing a composition by Hungarian composers Lajos Bárdos. Scattered among these pieces, the choir will share choral repertoire from our native treasury of song, including music by William Billings, a prolific composer from America’s colonial era. Additional music will include traditional folk songs, African-American spirituals, and repertoire drawn from our popular music tradition. Despite being drawn from distinctive and disparate cultures, the texts of the selections speak of universal ideas: faith and fellowship, love and loss. Over the course of our program, we sincerely hope that our domestic and international audiences will be moved by the symbiotic relationship between poetry and music and that the cumulative associations of each piece will evoke ever-developing images regarding the essence of life itself.
The concert is free and open to the public. A freewill offering will be collected.