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ImageOn Sunday, May 9, the Ithaca Community Orchestra (ICO) will present its spring concert entitled “Words of Sound,” a program highlighting the powerful combination of music and literature.  As the culminating event of the 2010 Finger Lakes Literary Festival, this year’s concert includes three pieces created to explore the themes of three different poems. 

Ithaca area poets and composers, as well as both vocal and instrumental soloists, chorus, and orchestra, will be featured.  This event will happen at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church at 4pm in Ithaca, New York, and was funded with grant support from the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County.

Local composer Zachery Wadsworth has written a composition especially for a poem by Amy Li that won the Ithaca High School Poetry Competition. Tom Schneller, also a local composer, has composed music for a poem by Jay Leeming, Tompkins County’s Poet Laureate. These works will be performed by soprano Judith Kellock and the ICO.  Li’s poem “Green Knolls” is a moving, insightful piece about young girls taking advantage of their slow childhood summertime to “ponder life and lie upon green knolls,” before womanhood finds them.  Leeming’s poem “Afterlife” provides a unique vision into the mystery of life after death.  Leeming, in the "Afterlife," describes all deceased souls, "flickering together...beyond the world."

Both Blaise Bryski, piano soloist, and the Ithaca Community Chorus are featured in the ICO’s performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy in C, Op. 80.  First performed at the famous Akademie (benefit concert) on December 22, 1808, Choral Fantasy was written by Beethoven as a “brilliant finale” that would unite, in a single piece, the performances of the orchestra, chorus, and piano soloist.  Beethoven asked the poet Christoph Kuffner to write the chorus verses, which nicely tie together Choral Fantasy’s theme of the universal meeting of the arts.  At one point in the piece, the chorus proclaims, “When the magic sounds reign and the sacred word is spoken, magnificence takes form, [and] the night and the tempest turn to light…art, and the spring sun floods them, and the others, with light.”

Cayenna Ponchione, Music Director, will lead the Ithaca Community Orchestra for this concert with help from Diana Geiger, assistant conductor.

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