Christmas Concert Approaches

We're now a few weeks away from our annual Christmas concert. It will take place on Saturday, December 20, at 7:30 PM, at the Burbank First United Methodist Church, 700 North Glenoaks Boulevard, Burbank, CA!

The title of our concert is "Rejoice," a refrain featured in one of the very festive pieces we'll be singing, Handel's coronation anthem, "Zadok the Priest." In the same spirit, our featured work is Mozart's Coronation Mass. We're also singing two gorgeous, a cappella devotional pieces in a very different style and mood from the Handel and Mozart works: a selection from Rachmaninoff's Vespers, No. 7, "The Six Psalms," and another Russian beauty, the Hymn to the Holy Mother, No. 11, from Tchaikovsky's Liturgy of St. John Chrystosom. The rich harmonies are joy to sing. We'll also do some tuneful Christmas and Hannukah favorites and end with our usual sing-along!

All are welcome to join the festivities. Pre-concert tickets are $15 and can be purchased on our website at www.burbankchorale.org.

Evensong at King's College

A week ago I fulfilled one of my choral singer's dreams: I heard the King's College Choir perform a choral evensong service in its own "chapel" at Cambridge. I put "chapel" in quotes because the building is really a small gothic cathedral built in early Tudor times. It is unquestionably one of the most exquisite small cathedrals of its type, with beautiful vaulted ceilings and talled stained glass windows filling the side walls with color and light.

The King's Choir is of course well know to choral music fans; it has made many good recordings, including one of the Vivaldi Magnificat which we sang last year (with comparable beauty, I might add!). As many also know, choral evensong is a regular evening service in the Anglican Church, one in which the choir takes a major role, singing psalms, anthems and other liturgical texts in between spoken "lessons" read from the Bible. The King's Choir is small in number (advertised at 16 though it looked a bit larger to me), and, with young boys singing the upper parts, it is literally small in stature. It wore white robes with red trim, and looked and sounded beautiful performing both a capella and with organ in the candle-lit cathedral. The music was almost all of 20th Century vintage, including a short Magnificat by William Walton and a powerful Anthem by John Joubert. "Modern" music seems to be the norm at King's these days. I guess the older material gets "old" after a while, especially given their steady schedule of services. Remarkably, the Choir performs six such services per week. That's a lot of music to learn, especially since the participants have school work to do in addition. On the seventh day, Monday, the Choir gets a day off and the service is sung by the King's Voices, which is the College's mixed choir. (Perhaps the same lower voices are involved, making it a seven-day proposition for those singers.)

If you're ever in London, and have time for a day trip, it's a 45-minute train ride up to Cambridge. The evensong service takes place at 5:30 PM and is free to the public. A memorable experience to be had for any choral singer or choral music fan.