School’s out for local college choirs and the choral season begins its final flourish today, in just four or five hours. For fifteen days there will be Copland, Fauré, Gershwin, Mendelssohn, Puccini, and Thompson in the Between Two College area sung by choir, chorale and opera chorus (and also some Tallis a bit farther out).
Today offers the evil Scarpia joining in Puccini’s Te Deum chorus at 2 p.m. in Pomona, in the first of four performances of Tosca by the Repertory Opera Company; then at 3 p.m., there is Robert Frost, Thompson, Copland and Gershwin in ‘America Sings,’ with the combined Claremont Chorale and Chorale Bel Canto, in Claremont. Tomorrow (8 June) the Mountainside Master Chorale is joined by the Cal State LA Chamber Singers in Mendelssohn’s Elijah in Claremont at 3:30 p.m. while the Claremont Chorale and Chorale Bel Canto take ‘America Sings’ to Downey at 4 p.m.
The ROC offers Tosca again Wednesday evening, and then again at 2 p.m. on Saturday, the 14th. The little while later on Saturday, the choir of the La Verne Church of the Brethren brings us the Requiem in D Minor by Gabriel Fauré and music of Vaughn Williams at 7 p.m. in La Verne.
Tosca will return for her final bow in Pomona on the 21st, the last day of the nominal local chorus season, but not quite the last for local choral singers. For that last locally connected choral music (with singers from here) you have to go a bit out of our area to hear Jouyssance sing the Lamentations of Jeremiah by Tallis in West Los Angeles and Pasadena on the 21st and 22nd of this month.
By the time the last notes are sung on the 22nd, ‘Sumer is icumen in’ will have become the truth in our hemisphere, leaving us with choral tidbits and some church choirs until we begin again around Labor Day. You are invited again to send word of summer choral life via the comments section or another way, so that it can be shared.
Today’s links belong to the Hillard Ensemble and Fats Waller and friends as they sing about the time of year in music some six or seven centuries apart.
Sumer is Icumen in – The Hilliard Ensemble
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMCA9nYnLWo
By the silvery moon – Fats Waller
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT2lQPp-5S4