Scott Cantrell, Dallas Morning News, Feb 20 2012

Stay tuned for more information, coming soon!  Volunteer and contributory options will abound!

Please join us for our Finale performance of the 2011/2012 season!!!  This concert features three masterpieces by three renowned composers: James MacMillan, Peteris Vasks, and Herbert Howells.  MacMillan’s powerful Mass for choir and organ, Howell’s Requiem for soloists and eight-part choir, and Vasks’ haunting Dona Nobis Pacem are the only works on this program. Virtuoso organist Michael Shake will be featured.

Saturday, 21 April 2012, 8.00pm

Spring Valley United Methodist Church, 7700 Spring Valley Road, Dallas 75254   MAP LINK

Sunday, 22 April 2012, 7.30pm

Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, 3966 McKinney Avenue, Dallas  75204  MAP LINK

All programs, dates, venues and performers subject to change.

Priority seats only available if purchased prior to concert.

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Stay tuned for more information, coming soon!  Volunteer and contributory options will abound!

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– John Norine, Jr., www.theaterjones.com    Oct 30, 2011

 (Private Invited Event for ACDA conference attendees only – no public tickets)

Wednesday, 29 February 2012,  7:00pm (check the conference program)

The Majestic Theatre, 1925 Elm Street, Dallas, Texas  MAP LINK   

Program:

7:00-7:35 p.m. Crystal Children’s Choir    Karl Chang, director
7:40-8:15 p.m. Orpheus Chamber Singers    Donald Krehbiel, director
8:30-9:10 p.m. Vocal Majority      Jim Clancy, director
9:15-10:00 p.m. Street Corner Symphony      Runners-up of Season 2 of NBC’s “The Sing-Off”

Note that Orpheus CDs will be available for purchase in the Majestic lobby!!!!

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By SCOTT CANTRELL / The Dallas Morning News
scantrell@dallasnews.com

Across four centuries, some of the most dramatic, virtuosic – and frankly sensuous – music ever penned reverberated through the Cathedral Santuario de Guadalupe on Sunday night. Marking the 400th anniversary of Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin , Dallas’ Orpheus Chamber Singers performed the work in collaboration with string players from Houston’s Ars Lyrica and a San Francisco-based baroque winds ensemble called The Whole Noyse. It was one of the most glorious musical experiences I’ve had in 11 years in Dallas.

Literally phrase by phrase, Monteverdi explores wide contrasts in musical effects. The 7-voice Magnificat opens with rich harmonies before voices virtually dance to the words “And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” The motet “Audi coelum” (“Hear, O heaven, my words”) answers florid tenor solos with distant echoes. Two tenors soar and flutter to dramatize the two seraphs of Isaiah’s heavenly vision.

Monteverdi left many decisions of voicing and instrumentation to the performers. With 20 singers and 14 instrumentalists, conductor Matthew Dirst liberally displayed the coloristic possibilities.

Mellow trumpet sounds were supplied by cornetts, leather-covered wooden instruments with trumpetlike mouthpieces. Sackbuts, forerunners of modern trombones, lent dusky solemnity. Recorders piped prettily. A theorbo, a bass lute, punctuated with husky twangs.

Dirst’s crisp but expressive direction yielded impressive precision, but also rhythmic buoyancy and rhetorical freedom. Lines were lovingly shaped, harmonic crunches viscerally felt, phrases elegantly rounded off. The one misjudgment was physically shifting singers around in the Magnificat, which was distracting and disruptive.

One soloist after another sang beautifully, but the standouts were soprano Julie Liston Johnson and tenors Derek Chester, Eduardo Tercero and Donald Krehbiel. On this occasion, Krehbiel, Orpheus’ artistic director, yielded direction to Dirst, artistic director of Ars Lyrica and an associate professor of musicology at the University of Houston’s Moores School of Music.

Yes, busier music dissolved in a welter of reverberation. But one could close one’s eyes and imagine oneself in Venice’s San Marco, where Monteverdi subsequently directed the music and doubtless performed some of this astonishing music – four centuries ago.

By SCOTT CANTRELL / The Dallas Morning News
scantrell@dallasnews.com

Every so often, a concert leaves us amazed that mere humans can produce such exquisite sounds, so eloquently expressed. That’s how it was Friday night with the Orpheus Chamber Singers, in their annual Christmas concert. If you weren’t there, you have two more chances to catch it.

Donald Krehbiel reliably coaxes world-class performances from his professional chamber choir. But in 11 years I don’t think I’ve heard the group sound quite so finely buffed and blended, yet so subtly expressive. Even traditional four-part harmonizations of familiar carols had the glow and gleam of chords dead in tune, an experience rarer than you might think.

The sound seemed a bit brighter and fresher than usual, the vowels more forward, consonants more crisply projected–all good things. And once again, St. Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic Churchsupplied a dream acoustic for choral music, clear but ringing.

Oboist Eric Barr and harpist Laura Logan lent beautiful accompaniments in several numbers.

“Christmas Hail,” by John Muehleisen, seemed second-rate fare, and both John Rutter’s sublime “What Sweeter Music” and Peter Wishart’s exhilarating “Alleluya, a New Work” were a notch or two too fast. In sing-along carols, an audience full of choir singers sang sonorously and well, in alternating unison and harmony, although organist Michael Conrady allowed no room for breaths.

As appealing as music by Palestrina, Victoria, Britten and Stephen Paulus was, the thoughtfully assembled program also reminded us how much wonderful poetry has been inspired by Christmas. From the Christmas responsory “O magnum mysterium” (set by Victoria) to Robert Herrick (set by Rutter) to Gerard Manley Hopkins (set by Britten), this was a celebration as much verbal as musical.

And practically any choir director on earth would sell his or her soul for those sweetly soaring Orpheus tenors.

Nov. 18, 2010, 5:45PM

Christmas brings the great monument of choral music that most people know: Handel’s Messiah. This year, the holiday season, as defined by when the Christmas merchandise hits the shelves, is focusing on another masterpiece: The 1610 Vespers of Claudio Monteverdi.

It may be unknown, but everybody interested in early music is performing the piece to celebrate its 400th anniversary. Saturday in Zilkha Hall, Matthew Dirst led his Ars Lyrica Houston, the Orpheus Chamber Singers of Dallas and the San Francisco-based Renaissance wind ensemble the Whole Noyse in a vivacious celebration of an early piece by one of the great composers of western classical music.

Filled with almost orgiastic melodies and “let’s see if I can top the last movement” inventiveness, Vespro della Beata Vergine, in its full name, saw the performers totally engaged to the tip of their toes.

Dirst’s conducting was crisp and authoritative. The Orpheus Chamber Singers sounded terrific and looked like they were having a great time (in one movement the entire group was physically moving to the beat of the music). The instrumentalists — especially the brass players handling tricky beasts — added sheen to the total sound.

Unlike Messiah or J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor, 1610 Vespers isn’t easy to pigeonhole. It’s really a collection of motets, settings of Psalms, a hymn, a mini-concerto for instruments (with a simple vocal melody floating over the top) and a setting of the Magnificat (the Virgin Mary’s recitation in the Gospel of John that is known in English as “My soul doth magnify the Lord”). Any one or two movements would be enough to brighten a church service. As a group, they’re electric stuff.

Written because Monteverdi was angling for a job in Venice — he later became music director at St. Mark’s Basilica and, still later, the first great opera composer — the work is a bridge between late Renaissance and early Baroque music. Monteverdi uses plenty of counterpoint but also a ravishing amount of the chordal style that defines early Venetian church music. Both blend nicely into a whole.

Orpheus Chamber Singers was a somewhat unusual choral group in that it contained many fine solo-quality voices that artistic director Donald Krehbiel has melded into a glowing whole. Among them, soprano Julie Liston Johnson and tenors Derek Chester and Eduardo Tercero were strong communicators. Chester in particular handled swaths of music with poise and listen-to-me authority.

Charles Ward was the Chronicle’s classical music critic from 1975 to 2008. E-mail him atsirernest42@gmail.com.