Concert Honors Brunelle
Jeff Hudson - Enterprise staff writer
Published: June 2, 2009
The Sacramento Choral Society and Orchestra returns to the Mondavi Center at 7 p.m. Sunday with a program dedicated to the late musician Dick Brunelle, who did much to advance the music program at Davis High School from the 1960s through the 1990s, and also served as music director at Davis Community Church for many years.
The concert — titled "Choral Soundscapes" — will feature a tapestry of music from the Baroque era to the early 21st Century, with some pieces being sung a cappella, and others being performed with an orchestra. Kendrick said he's taking advantage of the favorable acoustics at 1,800-seat Jackson Hall at the Mondavi Center to program music that he probably wouldn't have picked for a concert at the 2,400-seat Sacramento Community Center Theater."Some of these are pieces that we could not have pulled off artistically, with the nuances, had we not been in Mondavi, especially the a capella works," Kendrick said.
One of the longer pieces on the program is John Corigliano's nostalgic "Fern Hill," which incorporates text by the poet Dylan Thomas, describing the poet's recollections of his youthful days on a farm in Wales. The 16-minute piece was written in 1960, when Corigliano was 22, and was later revised as part of a trilogy of choral works that Corigliano wrote incorporating poems by Thomas.Corigliano is a New Yorker — his father was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic for many years. Over the decades, he's won multiple awards as a composer, including a Pulitzer (for his Second Symphony), an Oscar (for his score for the film "The Red Violin") and multiple Grammy awards (including one this year).Donald Kendrick, conductor of the Sacramento Choral Society, said "'Fern Hill' is a piece that we probably wouldn't get to do unless we were doing a program like 'Choral Soundscapes.'
For many of our concerts, we do a large oratorio, or a full-length mass or requiem. But on this program, we have the chance to do shorter pieces of music in a kaleidoscope of styles.""We're bringing in Hannah Penn, a soprano from the Portland Opera, as the soloist on 'Fern Hill,'" Kendrick added.As a companion to the Corigliano, the Choral Society will be singing "Lux Aurumque," a popular short piece by Eric Whitacre, an American composer in his late 30s who studied composition under Corigliano.
Another of the larger pieces on the program is "Feel the Spirit" by John Rutter, a 30-minute cycle of traditional spirituals performed with orchestra, including "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho," "Steal Away," "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" and, at the end, "When The Saints Go Marching In," a tune that coincidentally was also the closing piece of music at Brunelle's memorial service on May 18. Kendrick said that two longtime members of the Choral Society — soprano Joyce Scolnick and bass John Martin — will be featured as soloists in the Rutter. "I don't think the piece has been performed in this part of the country in the orchestral arrangement — it's only been done with piano accompaniment," Kendrick said. "So it's probably a regional premiere.
"There will also be short works with European roots by J.S. Bach (sung in German, of course), Pavel Chenokov (sung in Russian), G.F. Handel, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Michael Haydn (brother of the better known Franz Josef Haydn). Representing the New World will be short works by American composer Randall Thompson and Canadian composer Eleanor Daly — the latter an arrangement by Kendrick, who was born in Canada himself.Kendrick will be taking the Sacramento Choral Society (without orchestra) to Canada in late June, performing at two churches and a cathedral in Vancouver and Victoria. "It will be the Sacramento Choral Society's Canadian debut," Kendrick said.
Tickets are $30-$40 ($15-20 for students), available through http://www.mondaviarts.org or (530) 754-2787. More information is at http://www.sacramentochoral. com or (916) 536-9065.