The Con Brio Choral Society gathers for a photo.
Con Brio, the area’s renowned all-auditioned chorus, will present its spring concert on Sunday, May 4, at 4 p.m at Christ the King Church in Old Lyme. Directed by Dr. Stephen Bruce, assisted by Associate Director Susan Saltus, featuring soloists Patricia Schuman, Clea Huston. John Broderick and John Dominick III together with the Con Brio Festival Orchestra, this promises to be another joyful, not-to-be-missed concert.
The featured work will be Mozart’s splendid Vesperae solennes de Dominica, a piece commissioned in 1779 by the Archbishop of Salzburg for use in Sunday Vespers. Only 24 at the time, and just beginning his musical career, Mozart wrote some of his most memorable compositions in Salzburg. Proud of this work, Mozart asked his father to show it to a later patron. Though the title sounds formal, even forbidding, this piece has been called a “most delicious of Mozartean feasts, “ “one of the sunniest and most highly-concentrated of Mozart’s Salzburg choral works and one of this composer’s most spectacular soprano concert arias.”
The piece is in six movements, five of them settings of the daily psalms. Throughout, Mozart suits his music to the varying temperaments of the psalm texts. The traditional “Magnificat” brings the work to a life-affirming close. Those who attended Con Brio’s Christmas Concert have already had a chance to hear this magnificent last movement. Throughout, the chorus interweaves with the solo quartet. Patricia Schuman, the distinguished and widely known soprano, will be the principal soloist.
The second half of the concert includes selections the chorus will offer in its upcoming concert tour to France and Spain, as well as diverse secular and sacred pieces. As always, the audience will have its chance to participate.
An eight part antiphonal motet by the nineteenth century composer Josef Rheinberger, “Kyrie,” will be sung surrounding the beautiful space of Christ the King Church. Three diverse French pieces include a light country song, “La fanfare du printemps,” that the chorus acquired from a chorus in Sicily on an earlier tour; a beautiful setting of one of Rilke’s poems, “Dirait-on,” one of the best-selling choral octavos of the late-twentieth century by Morten Lauridsen (part of his Rilke song cycle,“Les Chansons des Roses”); and a delightful tongue-twister, “Ton thé a t’il ôté ta tou?” (“Your tea, has it taken away your cough?”).
Other pieces include a rousing 10-part arrangement of the folk song Cindy, a lovely arrangement of Robert Burns’ poem, “A Red, Red Rose,” Bartolucci’s“Jubilate Deo” (also learned from a chorus on tour in Italy), Palestrina’s “Exultate Deo,” and “Ride the Chariot” a spiritual featuring Patricia Schuman.
The concert will conclude with a stunning gospel song, “Praise His Holy Name” and the audience singing along in John Rutter’s joyful arrangement of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
What a joyous way to welcome in the spring!!
Tickets ($30, $15 student) may be purchased on line at www.conbrio.org, from any Con Brio member, or by calling 860 526 5399.
Christ the King Church is located at 1 McCurdy Lane, Old Lyme, Connecticut.
