The Upper Canada Choristers invite music lovers “To Sit and Dream”, at a concert celebrating women composers and hoping for a better future.
Laurie Evan Fraser conducts the 35-voice mixed choir and its accomplished Latin ensemble Cantemos in their third live streaming concert since the pandemic on October 1, 7:30pm.
Members of Cantemos and the Main Choir will appear on stage at Toronto’s Grace Church on-the-Hill, with the rest of the choir joining in virtually via ZOOM. ZOOM singers will be visible off and on throughout the concert. Hye Won Cecilia Lee is pianist.
Admission is free but donations are welcome to cover expenses. Further information will be posted on the choir’s website, www.uppercanadachoristers.org, or may be obtained by emailing [email protected] or calling (416) 256-0510.
“The music composed by women over the centuries is starting to come into its own,” said Laurie Evan Fraser. “We have a soul-stirring program ranging from 12th century Gregorian chant to Renaissance madrigals, choral works inspired by the folk rhythms of Venezuela and Argentina, and celebratory works by living composers in the U.S. and Canada.
“The selections, as a whole, constitute a dream of understanding between peoples, and hope for the future.”
The program will include voice-over narration by women from the choir, telling some of the stories behind the music.
The title work, To Sit and Dream, is by Dr. Rosephanye Powell, one of America’s premier women choral composers, to a text by the 20th century African-American, Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes.
Snow Angel is an extended piece written by Ontario composer Sarah Quartel in 2002, when she was a member of the Western University choir Les Choristes, in London. It has since been performed by choirs internationally. As Quartel says, “The work asks the listener to see the tremendous potential in our children. It celebrates love, beauty, and the strength that a child’s voice can bring to our troubled world.” Quartel wrote both the music and the lyrics. Subsequent to the very first performance, Lisa Helps wrote narrations to be performed between movements by three children. The narration for this work will be pre-recorded.
Also featured are present-day Italian composer Carlotta Ferrari’s spare arrangement of 12th century icon Hildegard von Bingen’s plainchant O splendidissima gemma (O splendid gem); two renaissance madrigals by the teenage Venetian composer Vittoria Aleotti; and another song inspired by an American poet – Iowa composer Elaine Hagenberg’s The Music of Stillness, to a poem by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933).
Cantemos performs numbers by two South American women inspired by the culture of their birth countries – Russian-educated Modesta Bor, whose music is steeped in the folk traditions of her native Venezuela; and Liliana Cangiano, who created lyrics and choral arrangements to many instrumental works by her countryman, Argentinian tango king Astor Piazzolla.
The Upper Canada Choristers and Cantemos present To Sit and Dream
Friday, October 1 at 7:30 p.m.
Live streamed from Grace Church on-the-Hill, Toronto
On YouTube (https://youtu.be/C8SBY7Q_FsU) and Facebook (https://fb.me/e/3jCg0V4b3)
Public info: www.uppercanadachoristers.org, 416-256-0510, [email protected]