The 2012-13 concert season for Michigan Tech’s Visual and Performing Arts department is wrapping up next Saturday, April 27, with the Michigan Tech Concert Choir and the Michigan Tech Chamber Singers performing a joint concert, “Springtime Voices,” at 7:30 p.m.
The first half of the concert will feature the Chamber Choir, “conScience,” a 12-member, student-only, auditioned ensemble, and focuses on what director Jared Anderson calls “Aspects of Imagination.”
The chamber choir’s selections will include the six chansons of Paul Hindemith, “staples of the chamber choir repertoire,” according to Anderson.
It will also have three “perspectives on love” via settings of different love poems: “Your Fragrence,” a translation of a text by Rumi; Shakespeare’s Sonnet 64, set to music by composer Dominic Argento; and Claudio Montevedri’s “Ah! dolente partita.”
Other selections include two other settings of Shakespeare by jazz composer George Scheuring, and a setting of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday.”
The second part of the concert will feature the Concert Choir, an 85-member group split about equally between students and community members, and will feature “a real eclectic mix” of songs. The first set is a “mystical kind of set,” including “Lion of the Heart,” another setting of a Rumi text composed by J. David Moore, as well as a piece called “Past Life Melodies” by Australian composer Sarah Hawkins. The latter is a wordless piece; instead of words, the vocals consist of various kinds of sounds that tie into Aboriginal Australia.
Other selections from this part of the concert include “Sun, Moon, and Stars,” which starts with a setting of an old folk melody from Mexico; “Epitaph for Moonlight,” an experimental piece (at least in the 1960s, when it was written) about how the race to put a man on the moon would take away the moon’s romanticism; and “Sure on this Shining Night,” a piece that focuses on the imagery of stars.
They will also perform some of their songs from the planned trip to the Balkans later this year, which includes music from that area as well as some American spirituals.
The Michigan Tech Concert Choir has performed since 1980. It was originally organized by Milton Olsson as the Michigan Tech Campus Chorus, and was renamed in 1997 when it had grown to over seventy regular members.
It has toured often throughout its history, beginning in 1990 with a tour to Mexico City, and touring to a variety of locations including the Czech Republic, Austria, Brazil, Russia and China since then. “conScience” is a much younger group, founded by Jared Anderson last year.