The Well-Tempered Ear

This Saturday night the Wisconsin Chamber Choir and Grammy winner Sarah Brailey perform a free live-streamed concert of music by women

May 13, 2021
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PLEASE HELP THE EAR. IF YOU LIKE A CERTAIN BLOG POST,           SPREAD THE WORD. FORWARD A LINK TO IT OR, SHARE IT or TAG IT (not just “Like” it) ON FACEBOOK. Performers can use the extra exposure to draw potential audience members to an event. And you might even attract new readers and subscribers to the blog.

By Jacob Stockinger

The Ear has received the following announcement to post:

The Wisconsin Chamber Choir (WCC, below) with a special guest — Grammy Award-winning soprano and UW-Madison graduate Sarah Brailey – will perform this Saturday, May 15, at 7 p.m.

“Music She Wrote” is a celebration of music composed by a highly diverse group of women from many ages.

Choir members will sing from their individual cars using wireless microphones, listening to the sound of the whole choir via their car radios.

The audience is invited to listen in live on YouTube and to let us know they are interested by sending an RSVP to our Facebook event.

There is no charge to view the livestream, but donations will be welcome. 

Here are the links to hear the performance LIVE on YouTube or Facebook:

https://youtu.be/Iaz0wZhuG18 or: 

https://www.facebook.com/events/1561155960751974/

The WCC had scheduled a regular concert with an all-female cast of composers for May 2020, which fell victim to Covid-19. As it became obvious that the pandemic would last longer, the WCC started exploring new ways of making and disseminating music.

From September 2020, we resumed activity in the shape of the Parking Lot Choir, generating local media coverage from WKOW-TV and Madison Magazine, whose story was headlined “Forget tailgates, parking lots are for choir practice.”

The result of this first rehearsal run was the widely acclaimed “Car Carols” concert in December 2020, whose format is the model for “Music She Wrote.”

In addition to the Parking Lot Choir, three smaller groups from the WCC assembled at the Edgewood College Amphitheater on Saturday mornings to rehearse (below) in widely spaced formations, wearing specially designed singer masks.

Another such group, made up of our members from southeastern Wisconsin, met in Whitewater on Sunday afternoons. Recordings by those four small groups will be aired during the May 15 broadcast in addition to live singing by the Parking Lot choristers.

The program includes: the Garden Songs by Fanny Hensel, née Mendelssohn (Felix’s sister, below), which were intended for outdoor performance; and Ethel Smyth’s March of the Women, the anthem of the women’s suffrage movement in the English-speaking world.

In addition to works by African American composers Ysaÿe M. Barnwell (below top) and Rosephanye Powell and by Cuban composer Beatriz Corona (below second), the program includes samples from outside the Western tradition — Lamma Badaa Yatathannaa, sung in Arabic, by Shireen Abu-Shader (below third), who hails from Jordan but received her academic education in the U.S. and Canada; and two pieces by Japanese composer Makiko Kinoshita (below bottom).

Western early music is represented by Italian composers Raffaella Aleotti (below top) and Chiara Cozzolani (below bottom), who lived in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Finally, there is singer-songwriter Judy Collins with her Song for Sarajevo, composed for the children of the war in Bosnia in 1994 and arranged by her longtime collaborator, Russell Walden. (You can hear it in the YouTube video at the bottom.)

For more details, visit: https://www.wisconsinchamberchoir.org/music-she-wrote.

Sarah Brailey (below, in a photo by Miranda Loud), a native of Wisconsin, studied at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she has just completed her doctorate. A consummate musician and internationally acclaimed soloist, she recently won a Grammy Award in the Best Classical Vocal Solo Album category for her role as The Soul in the world premiere recording of Ethel Smyth’s The Prison. 

She is familiar to Madison audiences not only as a performer and co-founder of Just Bach but also as the co-host of WORT’s Musica Antiqua show on FM 89.9 and the director of Grace Presents. 

As a graduate student, she joined the WCC for two seasons from 2004 to 2006. We are thrilled to welcome her back! For more information on Sarah, see her website at https://sarahbrailey.com


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Classical music: Choral Arts Society Chorale sings about immigration and longing for a home this Friday night. On Saturday night, the Mosaic Chamber Players offer piano trios by Beethoven and Brahms

April 26, 2018
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ALERT: The acclaimed Mosaic Chamber Players close out their current season on this Saturday night at 7:30 p.m. in the Landmark Auditorium of the First Unitarian Society of Madison, 900 University Bay Drive.

The program offers two of the most famous piano trios ever composed: the “Archduke” Trio in B-flat Major, Op. 97, by Ludwig van Beethoven; and the Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major, Op. 8, by Johannes Brahms. Tickets are at the door, cash or check only, and cost $15, $10 for seniors and $5 for students.

For more information, go to: http://www.mosaicchamberplayers.com

By Jacob Stockinger

The theme of immigration only seems to grow as a timely and politically charged topic not only here in the U.S. but also around the world, especially in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

In another indication that the performing arts are returning to a socially activist role in the current political climate, immigration is the unifying theme of a concert by The Choral Arts Society Chorale of Madison (below), a local community chorus.

The group performs this Friday night, April 27, at 7 p.m. at Trinity Lutheran Church, 1904 Winnebago Street, on Madison’s near east side, under the direction of the group’s artistic director Mikko Rankin Utevsky (below), who also founded and directs the Madison Area Youth Chamber Orchestra (MAYCO).

The program, titled “Would You Harbor Me?,” features music about and by immigrants, and about longing for a home.

The centerpiece is the 1998 cantata “The Golden Door” for chorus and chamber ensemble by Ronald Perera (below). You can hear the “Names” section of the work in the YouTube video at the bottom.

The work is based on texts from the archives of Ellis Island (below).

Also on the program – drawn from different time periods and different cultures — are pieces by various composers. They include Leonard Bernstein; Palestrina; Heinrich Isaac; Sydney Guillaume; Sweet Honey in the Rock‘s Ysaye Barnwell on themes of leaving home and welcoming the stranger; and Irving Berlin‘s setting of the poem from the Statue of Liberty (below).

Tickets are $15; $10 for students $10, and re available at the door, or online at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/choral-arts-society-chorale-spring-concert-tickets-44453227801.

The complete program is: Ysaye Barnwell: “Would You Harbor Me”; Palestrina: “Super flumina Babylonis” (By the Waters of Babylon); Traditional Irish, arr. Peter Knight: “O Danny Boy”; Carlos Guastavino: “Pueblito, mi pueblo” (Little village, my village); Heinrich Isaac: “Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen” (Innsbruck, I must leave you); Sydney Guillaume: Onè – Respè; Leonard Bernstein: “Somewhere” from “West Side Story”; Intermission; Ronald Perera: “The Golden Door”; Irving Berlin: “Give me your tired, your poor”

For more information about the group, go to: http://choralartsmadison.org


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