Brits & Brass
Friday, April 13, 2012 at 8 pm
Concert Conversation at 7 pm with
Tarik O’Regan

Central Lutheran Church
333 12th Street South, Minneapolis

     VocalEssence
Chorus & Ensemble Singers
    Copper Street Brass Quintet
    Maria Jette, soprano
    Hyounsoo Sohn, mezzo-soprano
    Dan Dressen, tenor
    James Bohn, baritone
    Philip Brunelle, conductor

Tickets: $13.50-$43.50
(Service charges apply. Student and group discounts are available.)

To purchase: call 612-371-5656
or visit vocalessence.org

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. (March 12, 2012) — Sometimes a concert should be just plain fun; Brits & Brass is that concert. Take a musical tour of London with VocalEssence and the Copper Street Brass Quintet. Jump on the Tube and join the fun on Friday, April 13th (8 pm) at Central Lutheran Church in Minneapolis. Be ready for some jolly good music featuring the American premiere of The Night’s Untruth by Tarik O’Regan (co-commissioned by VocalEssence) and The Far Theatricals of Day by Jonathan Dove. Tickets for Brits & Brass are $13.50-$43.50. For tickets and information, call 612-371-5656 or visit www.vocalessence.org.

Brits & Brass will open dramatically with Benjamin Britten’s Fanfare for St. Edmundsbury, with three trumpets surrounding the audience at Central Lutheran Church. As a nod to the Royal couple’s first anniversary, the musicians will perform Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry’s Blest Pair of Sirens, which was sung by the choirs of Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal at the Royal Wedding of Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Kate Middleton. The concert will also feature pieces by Judith Bingham and Samuel Sebastian Wesley.

Tarik O’Regan will be in the Twin Cities to work with the musicians before the American premiere of The Night’s Untruth. The piece explores the use of sleep as metaphor by dint of excerpts from poems written in the 17th to 20th centuries. Death, love, fear, ecstasy, isolation, dreaming and rest are all textual “variations” on the “theme” of sleep and can be found in the chosen texts. The work’s title is taken from a line in a poem by Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) and speaks to the composition’s focus on sleep as a parallel, possibly dystopian, existence to the one experienced in our waking hours.

Jonathan Dove’s The Far Theatricals of Day for soloists, choir, brass quintet and organ, was written in memory of the composer and conductor Christopher Whelen (1927-1993) and is a setting of selected verses by the American poet Emily Dickinson, many of which remained hidden until after her death. The title is taken from another Emily Dickinson poem and illustrates the way in which the work as a whole represents the unfolding of a day, with opportunities for a theatrical element in performance.

For additional information, contact Malia Cole (mcole@vocalessence.org, 612-547-1459).

Download high-resolution photographs from www.vocalessence.org > press room > image galleries.