The Island Community Chorus brings its latest holiday concerts to the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown this weekend, with performances Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m.
The Island Community Chorus brings its latest holiday concerts to the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown this weekend, with performances Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m.
More than 75 voices strong, the chorus is directed by William Peek with Molly Sturges on piano, Rebecca Laird on violin and Brian Weiland playing guitar and percussion.
Mr. Peek, who also is music director for the First Congregational Church of West Tisbury, has a knack for finding songs that celebrate the season without veering into holiday clichés. This year’s concert program includes selections from Christmas works by two very different composers, Camille Saint-Saëns and Jimmy Webb, alongside contemporary choral music and arrangements of songs dating back to late-Renaissance Europe.
“It’s a lot of happy, spirited music of the season, and many of the pieces are things you won’t hear elsewhere this year,” said Mr. Peek, an accomplished choral leader and multi-instrumentalist who spent much of his earlier career as music director for the First Unitarian Congregational church in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Shows are Saturday and Sunday at the Old Whaling Church.
Shows are Saturday and Sunday at the Old Whaling Church.
This weekend’s concerts include an uplifting piece he wrote for that church’s Christmas Eve service in 2003, I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day.
Other contemporary composers featured in the show include Bob Chilcott, with the pensive Somehow Not Only For Christmas; Sarah Riskind, with Oseh Shalom; and American singer-songwriter Karen Marrolli, whose We Belong opens the concert with an all-encompassing embrace: “We belong to one another, standing side by side.”
Mr. Peek also has uncovered a lesser-known Christmas work, written by Saint-Saëns in the late 19th century — and possibly in a last-minute holiday rush.
“It’s a beautiful Christmas oratorio [and] apparently he wrote it in two weeks,” Mr. Peek said. “I’m almost wishing we could do the whole piece, but we’re doing four selections.”
Singers Becky Williams and David Behnke will step forward for a duet on one of the Saint-Saëns movements, while another is an instrumental for piano and violin.
Choir is 75 community members strong.
Choir is 75 community members strong.
The chorus also is singing two pieces from The Animals’ Christmas, a holiday cantata composed in the 1980s by songwriter Jimmy Webb, known for hits such as Up, Up and Away, MacArthur Park and Wichita Lineman (with Glen Campbell). Mr. Peek played piano in some of the earliest performances of The Animals’ Christmas, with Art Garfunkel as soloist, along with a children’s choir from Mr. Webb’s church.
Mr. Garfunkel and Amy Grant later recorded the cantata with orchestral accompaniment.
This weekend’s performances of Mr. Webb’s Old Spanish Carol and Carol of the Birds offer a chance to hear the music as Mr. Peek did when it was new, fresh and unencumbered by corporate expectations.
Traveling further into music history, the chorus will sing Da Pacem Domine by German composer Melchior Franck, whose career spanned the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods.
“It’s a simple canon, but an ingenious canon, because when you put it together it really creates this beautiful little motet,” Mr. Peek said.
Gower Wassail, featuring soloist Dorian Lopes, is a Christmas song from the British Isles that was already old when it was collected nearly a century ago in Wales, Mr. Peek said.
“It’s a traditional wassail song that people would sing when they went caroling from house to house in England, Scotland and Wales,” he said.
While most of this weekend’s program will be new to Island audiences, Mr. Peek and the chorus also are bringing back a crowd-pleaser from last season: A Merry Christmas Wish, by Pepper Choplin, which deftly interweaves We Wish You A Merry Christmas with two original, complementary melodies.
“It’s a very clever piece [and] an audience participation closer,” Mr. Peek said. “We closed with this last year and everybody loved it.”
Tickets are available at the door, with a suggested donation for adults of $20.
Add new comment