Chorale, Cantabile to perform holiday concert

by Dennis Dalman

editor@thenewsleaders.com

Music, poems and sing-a-longs will be performed when the Great River Chorale and the Cantabile Girls’ Concert Choir together present their 15th annual holiday concert, Made in Minnesota: Music of the Season. There will be two concerts: 7:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 4 and 4 p.m. Sunday Dec. 6, both at Bethlehem Lutheran Church, 4310 CR 137 in St. Cloud.

The singers in the two groups hail from just about every city in central Minnesota.

The concerts’ narrator is Paul-Vincent Niebauer of the Order of St. Benedict and organist Charles Echols.

What’s unique about the concerts is all of the songs and poems were written by current or former residents of Minnesota cities. They include Abbie Betinis, Carol Barnett, Timothy Takach and Matthew Culloton, among others. The ensemble will premiere an arrangement of The First Noel by Laura Caviani. The work was commissioned by GRC to help celebrate its 15th season.

The Cantabile Choir will perform music by Betinis, Stephen Paulus, Robert Sieving, Nancy Grundahl and Marceyln Smale, who is a professor emeritus at St. Cloud State University.

The narrations at the concert will feature poems by Minnesota poets Kilian McDonnell of St. John’s Abbey, Minnesota Poet Laureate Joyce Sutphen (originally from St. Joseph) and award-winning poets David Bengtson of Long Prairie and Michael Dennis Browne, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota.

The concerts will end with audience sing-a-longs.

Tickets may be purchased in advance at greatriverchorale.com or at the door before each performance. The concert venue is handicapped-accessible.

GRC

There are about 60 singers in the St. Cloud-based Great River Chorale whose mission statement is a simple one: to enrich community through choral excellence.

The GRC is now in its 15th season.

GRC members range in age from 23-70 and come from 19 cities throughout central Minnesota. The group is known for its excellence in the world of music. It has performed at the Ordway Concert Hall in St. Paul, twice on Minnesota Public Radio’s Taste of the Holidays CD and many times on Classical Minnesota Public Radio’s Regional Spotlight.

The GRC often performs with the St. Cloud Symphony Orchestra.

The current GRC artistic director is Mary Kay Geston, appointed in 2010. Geston has taught music at Northwestern University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Northern State University, St. Olaf College and Concordia University at St. Paul.

Choirs under her direction have performed at prestigious venues far and wide. She has been a guest clinician in Taiwan and South Korea, and she has directed all-state, honor and festival choirs in six states, including Minnesota.

Cantabile

The Cantabile Girls’ Choir is sponsored by St. Cloud State University’s Music Department and offers young local girls in grades 4-6 the chance to sing in a quality choir.

The choir is known by many fans for its performances at the GRC holiday show and for its annual Her Story, Her Song, in which the performances honor the female experience in song, word and action. The popular show is now in its 14th season.

Brooks

A guest performer at the upcoming concerts will be Barbara Brooks, who is a vocal coach, pianist and music director in the Twin Cities area.

She has served as vocal coach for several opera companies, including the Minnesota Opera, New Orleans Opera and Kentucky Opera.

Brooks was also music director for the Tony-award-winning Twin Cities-based Theatre de la Jeune Lune and Minneapolis Children’s Theatre Company.

She is on the music staff of the Wesley Balk Opera/Theatre Institute and has served as opera coach at many university music departments.

Brooks has a master’s degree of music in piano performance from the University of Michigan School of Music, where she studied with the renowned painist Gyorgy Sandor. She also studied with Martin Isepp at the Banff (Canada) Center of the Arts and the Britten-Pears School in England.