Archive: Arts & Entertainment

The Cornell Chorale performs on Friday, April 27 at 8:00pm in Sage Chapel. The concert highlight will be Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, planned to coincide with the celebration of his 100th birthday. Director Stephen Spinelli selected the work, one of Bernstein's largest and most beloved choral pieces, to honor his impact on conducting, composition, and overall music-making. Organist Anna Steppler and the Cornell Percussion Ensemble join forces with the Chorale on the Bernstein, with Steppler also opening the concert with Ralph Vaughan Williams' Suite of English Folk Songs and the Percussion Ensemble performing a work inspired by the painter Paul Klee. Spinelli will showcase the ensemble's diversity by featuring a trio of folk songs taught and conducted by students in the Chorale, with each piece coming from the native country of the representative student conductor.

The Cornell Chamber Singers, also directed by Spinelli, perform on Saturday, April 28 at 7:00pm in Sage Chapel, singing Vaughan Williams' Mass in G Minor. Spinelli says the piece is Vaughan Williams' "attempt at finding faith, and it is a way station in his journey to healing his survivor's guilt" after serving in World War I and witnessing the casualties of war.

Spinelli adds "the mass is also a beautiful homage to the British choral tradition, which was eminently threatened by the war. We hear this tribute in neo-Renaissance, polyphonic textures, and the folk music-style use of musical modes." The Chamber Singers will also perform a piece by Polish composer Roman Palester, whose work was censored by the communist government after World War II. The piece features an instrumental ensemble of students and faculty from both Cornell and Ithaca College and depicts the Vistula River, which was a symbol of national pride and constancy in a time of political and cultural instability.

The Cornell Symphony Orchestra concludes its spring semester on Sunday, April 29 at 3:00pm in Bailey Hall. Under the direction of Chris Younghoon Kim, the orchestra performs an all-Tchaikovsky program of Marche Slave and Symphony No. 6, "Pathétique." The Symphony received its premiere only days before Tchaikovsky's death, 125 years ago.

v14i15