Collegiate Choir Tours Upper Midwest, Canada
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| 2013 Collegiate Choir | |
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Tour Schedule Friday, March 8, 2:10 p.m. Friday, March 8, 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 9, 7:30 p.m. Sunday, March 10, 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 11, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 12, 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 14, 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 15 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 16, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 19, 8:00 p.m. |
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March 7, 2013
BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— Illinois Wesleyan's Collegiate Choir will embark on its spring concert tour during spring break, with a series of concerts March 8-19.
The tour itinerary includes performances in Peoria, Sterling, Barrington, and Bloomington, Ill., Monona, Wis., Maplewood, Minn., Winnipeg, Canada, Fargo, N.D., Clive, Iowa, and Delavan, Wis.
The Illinois Wesleyan University Collegiate Choir has established a long history of excellence through its on-campus performances, annual tours and recordings. The Choir also sponsors the IWU Choral Commission Series, which in its 62-year history has added many significant works to the choral repertoire and resulted in a number of important world premieres at IWU.
The 44-voice choir is composed of student musicians representing the School of Music and other areas of the University, and is dedicated to the performance of the finest sacred and secular choral music of the past five centuries. Students in the choir are selected by audition and maintain a rigorous rehearsal schedule in preparation for their concert tour and other engagements throughout the year.
The Choir is under the direction of Dr. J. Scott Ferguson, Director of Choral Activities at Illinois Wesleyan University. The Collegiate Choir has received acclaim for the “breath-taking beauty and skill of the voices, the superb repertoire, and the awesome musicality.“ Programs have been called “wonderfully well-selected, versatile, interesting, and musical.” An Estonian conductor praised the choir’s “clear intonation, beautiful and sound harmony, multifarious strokes, and broad dynamic scale. A renowned Czech conductor noted, “I was overwhelmed by the great intonation, precise rhythm, beautiful work with dynamics, and incredible stylistic interpretation of compositions from all style periods and genres.”
This year’s tour program includes literature from the Renaissance, Baroque, and contemporary eras. The program will begin with three sacred compositions from the English Renaissance and Baroque eras by William Byrd, Henry Loosemore, and Henry Purcell. Contrasting these works will follow three twentieth-century compositions. Unruh der Zeit, a relatively unknown work by Rudolph Mauersberger, will precede Stránnoye Rozhdestvó vídevsche by Georgy Sviridov, and Song of Cherubim by Krzysztof Penderecki.
To begin the second half of the program, the Choir will perform Five Flower Songs, Op. 47, by Benjamin Britten.
The final section of the program consists of compositions by contemporary American and British composers, the texts of which include images of fire. Hymn to the Creator of Light by John Rutter will be followed by the 2012-2013 commissioned work, Lösch mir die Augen aus, by Andrew Rindfleisch. The program will conclude with the dramatic Fire! by John Orfe.
Contact: 556-3181, univcomm@iwu.edu