Step into Fall with an evening of music that dances. The Santa Clara Chorale opens its 2019-2020 season with a lively program featuring selections from Brahms' Liebeslieder Waltzer, Alice Parker’s Songstream, and David Conte's Invocation and Dance. A four-hand piano accompaniment will invite you to move with the music.
Johannes Brahms’ Liebeslieder Waltzer reflected two musical trends of the 1800s: dances played as piano duets and romantic vocal pieces--both light and unpretentious, and designed for performance by talented amateurs rather than concert artists. Brahms himself enjoyed this music and understood its appeal to working-class audiences.
Alice Parker’s Songstream is a 1983 choral setting of nine poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, which she composed in the style of Brahms’ Liebeslieder Waltzer: “I pretended that I was Brahms as I wrote–feeling the energy to get a whole roomful of people dancing, and then allowing the words to sing . . .“
David Conte’s 1986 Invocation and Dance is based on text drawn from Walt Whitman’s When Lilacs Last at the Dooryard Bloom’d--described as “a hymn to nature and the place of death within the cycle of life on earth.” The first movement is a solemn invocation over pulsating accompaniment, and the second movement an exuberant dance celebrating life and joy.
The Santa Clara Chorale, an 80-voice community chorus formed in 1962, performs a diverse repertoire ranging from the classical masterworks of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart to contemporary choral music, including jazz, folk, spirituals, popular, and world music. The Santa Clara Chorale, an 80-voice community chorus formed in 1962, performs a diverse repertoire ranging from the classical masterworks of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart to contemporary choral music, including jazz, folk, spirituals, popular, and world music.