Event

Peace Love & Robert Graves

Extraordinary Bay Area pianist Susan Soehner joins the San Francisco Bay Area Chamber Choir on April 1 & 2, 2017, for our spring concerts: Peace, Love & Robert Graves.

Morten Lauridsens Mid-Winter Songs (1980), on poems of Robert Graves, is the featured work on the program. In contrast to his more recent "impressionistic" choruses, Lauridsen, a National Medal of Arts recipient and Distinguished Professor of Composition at the University of Southern California, describes his Mid-Winter Songs as "cool and crisp" with "edges and rhythmic vitality." Demanding for both singers and pianist, this five-movement work is virtually a concerto for piano and chorus.

Also on the program are songs of passionate love, indifferent love, unfaithful love, and fairy-tale love by Johannes Brahms, Maurice Ravel, and Gabriel Fauréincluding the choral version of Fauré's beloved "Pavane" with flautist Barbara Brown. Ms. Soehner will also play British composer Herbert Howells's "Ralph's Pavane," a tribute to Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Songs of peace by American composers Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Lou Harrison, and New York-based Rich Campbell round out the program. Campbell's "If Ever There Is" (2013), an impassioned and rhythmically vital setting of Robert Creeley's "John's Song," was one of six works to be honored by Essentially Choral, a program for emerging young composers. Just as Creeley does with words and phrases in his poem, Campbell uses rhythmic and harmonic repetition to build up a powerful and insistent plea for peace.