News Release

Concert Choir, Women's Chorale to perform Oct. 30


Contact: Christina Chapple

10/24/08



     HAMMOND – The Southeastern Louisiana University Concert Choir and Women’s Chorale will present “Upon Your Heart,” a free concert Thursday, Oct. 30.

     The concert begins at 7:30 p.m. at the First United Methodist Church, 220 Rue Denise in Hammond. The Southeastern choirs are under the direction of Alissa Mecurio Rowe, head of the vocal section of the university’s Department of Music and Dramatic Arts.

     The highlight of the concert, Rowe said, will be the Concert Choir’s performance of Jeffrey Van’s “A procession Winding Around Me,” which is set to text from Walt Whitman's Civil War poem, "Drum-Taps."

     The piece will feature classical guitarist David Bryan of Hammond, a music graduate student and member of the university’s Guitar Quartet.

     The Women’s Chorale will open the concert with “Gloria Tibi” from Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” and “The Snow, Op. 26, no. 1” by Edward Elgar. Southeastern music majors Antoaneta Gyuzlieva of Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, and Iullia Alyeksyeyeva of Kherson, Ukraine, will be featured on violin.

     Rachel Van Voorhees, principal harpist of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra will be featured with the Women’s Chorale in Johannes Brahms’ “Vier Gesänge, op. 17,” four laments about love. She will be joined on horn by Bobby Cotter, a new member of the Department of Music and Dramatic Arts faculty, and Ruth Linder, music graduate student from Hammond.

     “Brahms chose his instruments to complement the affect of the words: the harp was traditionally an instrument of mourning, and the horn the instrument of destiny,” Rowe said.

     The chorale will also perform Daniel Gawthrop’s “Mary Speaks” and Rosephanye Powell’s “Ascribe to the Lord,” conducted by senior music education major Paula Vickers of Mandeville.

     Soprano Keturah Turner, a junior vocal performance major from Hammond, will solo with the Concert Choir in “Hark I Hear the Harps Eternal.” The choir will also perform “Wondrous Love,” “Three Motets, op. 38” by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, “Upon Your Heart” by Eleanor Daley, and “Fix Me Jesus.”

     The Concert Choir will conclude the program with “Elijah Rock” by the late Moses Hogan, the internationally-recognized New Orleans-born pianist, conductor and arranger of African-American spirituals. Hogan’s Moses Hogan Choral captured the hearts of audiences world-wide before his death in 2003.

     “The exclamation of ‘Elijah Rock’ is begun in the repetitive bass line, but later moves to the tenors. The energy builds throughout the work, exploding at the end,” Rowe said.

     For additional information about the concert, contact Rowe at arowe@selu.edu or 985-549-2334.



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