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Two Performances
8 p.m. Saturday, May 18, 2002
Central Congregational Church
Providence, R.I.
4 p.m. Sunday, May 19, 2002
Saint Luke’s Church
East Greenwich, R.I.
Tickets:
Single admission: $16
Student rush:* $5
Call for group discounts
Tickets also available at the door
* Student tickets are available 15 minutes before the performance with a valid school ID. When parents purchase their own tickets in advance, they may purchase $5 student tickets for their children at the same time. |
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The Providence Singers
“When Birds Do Sing”
Mark Conley, guest conductor
Libby Larsen: Invitation to Music
Benjamin Britten: Hymn to St. Cecilia (Op. 27)
Arnold Schoenberg: Der Mai tritt ein mit Freuden (Op. 49, No. 2)
Felix Mendelssohn: Five Songs (from Op. 59)
Ivan Hrusovsky: Rytmus
Daniel Pinkham: Wedding Cantata
Lloyd Pfautsch: Musicks Empire (from Triptych)
 Mark Conley is an active conductor, composer and performer who joined the faculty at the University of Rhode Island in the fall of 1997. His duties at URI include directing the two choral ensembles: the Concert Choir, an auditioned group of thirty-six select singers, and the University Chorus, a major ensemble open to the community at large. He also serves as chorus master for the Ocean State Lyric Opera, a professional company in Providence, R.I. His interest in the musical theater has led him to serve as music director for five different theater companies, most recently with the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theater for their highly acclaimed production of Quilters.
Mr. Conley’s compositions include both choral and instrumental works. The Illinois Arts Council commissioned his collaboration with deaf storyteller Sam Supalla, A Handful of Voices, for American Sign Language storyteller, English narrator and piano. An excerpt from this larger work became Ragtime: The Best Whiskey in the West for woodwind quintet, first performed by the Gallatin Woodwind Quintet in Montana. His choral piece “Thys Yool” from Incunabula won the Sadie Rafferty Choral Composition Competition. His music is published by Alliance Music and Earthsongs.
As a performer, Mr. Conley has appeared in operas with the Intermountain Opera, Aspen Opera Theater Center, Ocean State Lyric Opera and Papagena Opera. He has sung as an oratorio soloist with orchestras across the country. An active recitalist, he is particuliarly interested in the American and British composers of the Twentieth Century.
Mr. Conley’s interest in the training of future professional musicians is evident in his activities as a clinician and adjudicator. He also serves as faculty advisor for the URI student chapter of the American Choral Directors Association. For that association, he is currently Rhode
Island Repertoire and Standards Chair for Youth and Student Activities. He is also director of URI’s summer camp for junior high and high school students, the Experiential Summer Program for Young Musicians (ESPYM).
Notes on the concert
The repertoire of secular choral works dealing with springtime, love and music itself is vast. Despite this collection of wonderful music, ensembles perform these pieces all too infrequently. One reason for this discrepancy is undoubtedly the length of the music involved. In general, secular choral works tend to be shorter than their sacred counterparts. Program one oratorio, requiem or mass and an ensemble often has a complete concert. A performance of secular works, on the other hand, involves collecting works from various time periods, styles, languages and themes and trying to put them in context with one another and to present them to the audience as a coherent whole.
In this concert the chorus presents a short piece exploring each topic followed by a longer, more reflective piece on the same subject. The texts interrelate between sets in ways that you are invited to explore and place in your own life’s context. Certainly Auden’s lines (set by Britten) “All you lived through / dancing because you / no longer need it / for any deed” describe the place of music in times of difficulty; words that resonated in the midst of World War II regain something of their original power in our own time. The texts of hope, renewal and the tranquility of natural beauty the German Romantics recognized as essential to the human condition sing to us as clearly as does Goethe’s nightingale: “What news must she have missed to sing the old songs once more?” Pinkham’s settings of excerpts from the biblical Song of Songs are sacred in their celebration of all forms of love, but theirs is certainly not a sacred realm of distant holiness!
The last piece in the program brilliantly encapsulates the whole of Western music history in a few minutes. As the music moves from Medieval chant to Twentieth Century, it is possible to reflect on the universality of the experiences described in all types of music. Auden’s text for St. Cecilia reminds us of that very strength of the art of sound: “I shall never be different / Love me.”
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