Four Western Michigan University choirs share the stage this Sunday for a program that takes on some of music's oldest questions about life, death and remembrance.
The fall choral showcase features Anima, Amphion, the Collegiate Singers and the University Chorale at 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 18, in the Dalton Center Recital Hall. Tickets are available in advance at wmich.edu/music/events or at the door (no cash transactions at the door).
Speaking with Cara Lieurance, Dr. Jacob Berglin, WMU's director of choral education, says October programs often lean toward the spooky, but this program examines the cycles of life. This year the theme also looks ahead to spring, when the choirs perform Bach's St. Matthew Passion with the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra. "It's been interesting to be able to explore just more generally sort of the concepts of death and life and those sorts of things," he says.
The concert also marks 50 years since the death of Benjamin Britten. Anima sings "This Little Babe" from A Ceremony of Carols, and four of the Choral Dances from Britten's opera Gloriana are on the program. Amphion follows with a set about memory, including David Childs' "Weep No More," Antonio Lotti's "Miserere mei" and Hye-Young Cho's Korean-language "Evocation." "It's big and emotional and it really works well for tenors and basses," Berglin says.
Dr. Abby Musgrove, WMU's new director of choral activities, previously led choral programs in Illinois and Southern Oklahoma and conducts the Spero Chamber Chorale in Springfield, Illinois. "The students here are just so skilled. So it's fun to push them and challenge them," she says.
Her University Chorale set opens with Williametta Spencer's dramatic "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners," a setting of John Donne by the American composer, who died earlier this year. It continues with Don Macdonald's "Tabula Rasa," a Haydn "Resurrexit" led by graduate student Mike Jones, a work by Monteverdi, a William Dawson spiritual and a folk arrangement of a Pete Seeger song. Musgrove says the spiritual pairs classical vocal technique with insistent rhythm, and "you can't listen to a spiritual done well and go away unchanged, in my opinion."
The interview was summarized by Claude AI and edited by the author.
