By Chip Chandler — Digital Content Producer
Amarillo Master Chorale will celebrate what's oddly gorgeous about nighttime — and what emerges, rather than just lays down to rest — in a new concert Friday.
The choir, a community organization based at Amarillo College, will give its "Night, Strange and Beautiful" concert at 8 p.m. Friday at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, 1601 S. Georgia St. Tickets are $15 for adults and $5 for students in advance, or $20 for adults and $7 for students at the door. Call 806-371-5340.
"I tried to choose music that goes beyond the stereotypically mood of nighttime because I wanted to explore the rather complicated web of things that comes alive (rather than going to sleep) at night," conductor Nathaniel Fryml said. "We touch on love, of course, but not as a foregone conclusion. ... Actually, several pieces on the program that deal with love specifically bring in an element of uncertainty with regards to the past or future."
Among the works to be performed include Samuel Barber's To Be Sung on the Water, which resignedly deals with the metaphor of two ships passing in the water; Abendlied by Josef Rheinberger, inspired by Luke 24:29; Come to Me, My Love by Norman Dello Joio, based on the poem Echo by Christina Rossetti; and Pilgrim-child by Fryml.
Other pieces on the concert include Eric Whitacre's Water Night and Hector Berlioz's Dance of Shadows, "which is really about as ghostly, or maybe ghastly?, as anything I've ever come across in choral music," Fryml said.
The works are sung in eight different languages, Fryml said.
"The reason we’ve gone through the substantial additional effort of bringing in this unique element of our choral art in such a concentrated way is that we also want the program to have a timeless or boundless quality," Fryml said. "In the same way that we all experience night and day no matter where on earth we live, there are things in life that speak to our hearts in a much deeper way than an official national language ever could."
Chip Chandler is a digital content producer for Panhandle PBS. He can be contacted at Chip.Chandler@actx.edu, at @chipchandler1 on Twitter and on Facebook.
