Northwest Choral Society May 22nd Concert
"I was irresistibly drawn to translate his music into mine" - composer John Corigliano regarding poet Dylan Thomas's poem" Fren Hill."
Penny Perles
"Home" is the title and collective subject of the concert and music selections to be performed at Northwest Choral Society's (NWCS) second performance of the 2021-22 season on Sunday, May 22. The concert is at St. Raymond de Penafort Church in Mount Prospect and begins at 4 p.m.
NWCS' new artistic director, Thomas R. Colao, will conduct and collaborative pianist Lori Lyn Mackie will accompany the chorus. "The concert is centered around the idea of "Home" - what it means, the various forms it can take, and how our perception of places, feelings, and ideas can change over time," Colao explains.
Contemporary classical composer John Corigliano's choral setting of poet Dylan Thomas' verse "Fern Hill" is the concert's featured composition, describing rhymester Thomas' childhood summer and holiday "home"at Fernhill farm in Carmarthenshire county in the southwest of Wales.
Other songs on the concert program include the Negro spiritual "We Shall Walk Through the Valley,"arranged by Undine Smith Moore, "The Road Home" by Stephen Paulus, traditional spiritual "I Got a Home in-a Dat Rock," arranged by Moses Hogan, the peppy "Unclouded Day" with words and music by Rev. J.K. Atwood and arrangement by Shawn Kirchner, and the classic American folksong "Shenandoah" arranged by James Erb. NWCS members Greg Park from Hawthorn Woods and Hilary Osler from Mount Prospect will sing solos in "I Got a Home in-a Dat Rock" and "Unclouded Day," respectively.
Guest mezzo-soprano Jocelyn Colao will be the soloist for "Fern Hill." Ms. Colao is a graduate of Westminster Choir College, where she earned a bachelor's degree in vocal performance. Ms. Colao has sung with professional ensembles such as Anam Cara, Princeton Pro Musica, Juneau Vocal Alliance, Kinnara Ensemble and Brevitas Choir. Ms. Colao also has sung internationally as a member of the choruses for The Festivale Pro Musica e Arte Sacra, the International Festivale per Giovanni Musicisti, and the Concerto Capella Sistina & Idyllic Ireland tour, where she was a member of the first American choir to give a performance in the Sistine Chapel. She currently resides in a Chicago North suburb with her husband, Tom, and their son, Christopher.
Dylan Marlais Thomas (Oct. 27, 1914-Nov. 9, 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "And death shall have no dominion," the 1954 radio drama and 1972 film adaptation "Under Milk Wood," and stories and radio broadcasts such as "A Child's Christmas in Wales" and "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog." He became widely popular in his lifetime for the original, rhythmic, musical sound of his poetry and ingenious use of words and vivid imagery, and remained so after his death at the age of 39 in New York City. By then, he had acquired a reputation, which he had encouraged, as a "roistering, drunken and doomed poet."
In 1931, when he was 16, Thomas, an undistinguished pupil, left school to become a reporter for the South Wales Daily Post. Many of his most famous works appeared in print while he was still a teenager, though he found earning a living as a writer was difficult. He began augmenting his income with reading tours and radio broadcasts. His radio recordings for the BBC during the late 1940s brought him to the public's attention, and he was frequently used by the BBC as an accessible voice of the literary scene.
His time in the United States cemented his legend, and he went on to record to vinyl works such as "A Child's Christmas in Wales." The original 1952 recording of "A Child's Christmas in Wales" was a 2008 selection for the United States National Recording Registry, stating that it is "credited with launching the audiobook industry in the United States."
His childhood featured regular summer and holiday trips in the 1920s to the Llansteffan peninsula, a Welsh-speaking part of Carmarthenshire, where his maternal relatives were the sixth generation to farm. In the land between Llangain and Llansteffan, his mother's family worked a dozen farms with over a thousand acres. The memory of Fernhill, a dilapidated 15-acre farm with an orchard rented by his aunt, Ann Jones, and her husband, Jim, is evoked in the 1945 lyrical poem "Fern Hill."
Fern Hill isn't named anywhere in the poem except the title. However, the poem is filled with intensely lyrical language and rich metaphorical descriptions that capture the excitement and joy of playing outside as a child and feeling in harmony with the natural world. Sinking back into vivid memories, the speaker, (Dylan Thomas) conjures the many wonderful elements of the farm - its plants and animals, how it felt at night and at dawn. Then, at the end of the poem, the speaker depicts how "the farm forever fled from the childless land." In other words - as a symbol of childhood's joy and innocence - the farm leaves the speaker when the speaker grows up. After the speaker becomes an adult, Fernhill exists only in memory.
John Paul Corigliano (born February 16, 1938) is an American composer of contemporary classical music. His scores, now numbering over one hundred chamber, vocal, choral, and orchestral works that have been performed and recorded by many of the world's most prominent orchestras, soloists and chamber musicians, have won him the Pulitzer Prize, five Grammy Awards, the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, and an Oscar.
A former concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, he is a Distinguished Professor of Music at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and on the composition faculty at the Juilliard School. In 1987, Corigliano was the first composer ever to serve as Composer-in-Residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. During his residency, he composed his Symphony No. 1, which was inspired by the AIDS epidemic. Corigliano is known for his film score for François Girard's The Red Violin (1997), which was subsequently adapted as a Violin Concerto for Joshua Bell.
Sir James Galway has called John Corigliano "the most talented composer today, and he will have a direct influence on the course of American music for generations to come."
When he composed ''Fern Hill,'' Corigliano was 21 and had just graduated from Columbia University. With no commissions on the horizon, and a new-found passion for Dylan Thomas's poetry, he wrote a choral setting of ''Fern Hill'' as a gift for his music teacher at Midwood High School in Brooklyn, who encouraged him to compose at a time when his parents -- his father, also named John Corigliano, was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic -- were trying to dissuade him.
As John Corigliano explains regarding the choral setting composition of "Fern Hill," "I first encountered Dylan Thomas's work in 1959, my last undergraduate year at Columbia. It was a revelation. Both the sound and structures of Thomas' words were astonishingly musical. Not by accident, either: he (Dylan Thomas) wrote in his 'Poetic Manifesto' of 1951 that ". . . what the words meant was of secondary importance; what matters was the sound of them. . . these words were as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments. I was irresistibly drawn to translate his music into mine."
The concert safety protocols require all NWCS members and guests to wear masks and maintain social distancing.
Tickets for the "Home" concert are $20 for adults and $15 for students and seniors if purchased online at www.nwchoralsociety.org or by calling 224 / 585-9127 prior to the May 22 concert. Tickets purchased starting an hour prior to the concert at St. Raymond de Penafort Church, corner of Elmhurst Avenue and Lincoln Street in Mt. Prospect, are $25 for adults and $20 for students and seniors.
Rehearsals for the NWCS 2022-23 season will begin on September 13, with the new session's first concert to be scheduled for early December. Details of the 2022-23 season programs and venues will be released as soon as possible this summer.
NWCS' concert programs are sponsored in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council.
Founded in 1965, the Northwest Choral Society is a non-profit organization that promotes and encourages the appreciation, understanding and performance of a wide variety of outstanding choral literature. Its adult membership resides in the greater Chicago area.
The Northwest Choral Society invites experienced singers to audition to join the organization. Basses, tenors, altos and sopranos with previous choral experience and at least 17 years of age can obtain additional information about the Northwest Choral Society at www.nwchoralsociety.org.