Richmond Chorus’s April 1 concert will focus on music about, by and for children - and we are delighted to be joined by Vivo Children’s Choir from New Westminster.
Date/Time: Apr 1 2017, 7:30 pm to 10:00 pm
Richmond, South Arm United ChurchCost: $18.00
Find tickets: here
Vivo, directed by Anne Wilson Unger, Carrie Taylor and Ingrid Verseveldt, has been singing together since 2002, working in graded levels to allow children to improve their music skills.
Springtime speaks to new life and growth, and what more appropriate time to consider all that children have to offer to our world?
The program will begin with a set of lullabies that will include the Latino Duerme Negrito, Eric Whitacre’s charming Seal Lullaby and Carol Hall’s song to Jenny Rebecca, Four Days Old in a setting by Clair McElfresh. From there we move to games: the delightful Teddy Bears Picnic, a south African children’s game-song and the slightly raucous Tell My Ma, which is a Belfast street-kids song.
We complete the first half of the program with the Five Childhood Lyrics of English composer John Rutter. They were inspired by rhymes and verses for children, but the first four of the five are totally original compositions, with only the final piece being based on a well-known melody. They comprise of:
i. Monday’s Child
ii. The Owl and the Pussy-Cat (poem by Edward Lear)
iii. Windy Nights (poem by Robert Louis Stevenson)
iv. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
v. Sing A Song of Sixpence
In the second half of the program we include three excerpts from a longer suite called Butterfly Songs by Jeannie Brindley-Barnett. The poems are taken from a collection written by children in the Terezein concentration camp during World War II, and are full of beautiful imagery, even when the children writing them feared what the future would hold. We will be joined by a jazz ensemble to sing To Olga, In A Garden and Birdsong.
Following a set from Vivo Children’s Choir, both ensembles will join together to sing Let Wildness Sing, a wonderful anthem to our environment, and one which was commissioned by the BC Choral Federation for the Fourth International Children’s Conference on the Environment. We will end the program with John Rutter’s sparkling arrangement of Down By The Riverside.
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