ASHLAND – Ashland University’s annual Winter Choral Concert is set to take place on Sunday, March 1, at 4 p.m.
It will include performances by the AU Chamber Singers, the Ashland Area Chorus and the AU Choir. The concert, which is free and open to the public, will take place at Jack and Deb Miller Chapel.
Ron Blackley, director of choral activities and professor of music at AU, will serve as conductor.
The AU Chamber Singers, a select choir, will perform Benjamin Britten’s “Five Flower Songs.”
The series of unaccompanied choral songs first premiered in 1950 and consists of poems by four different English authors.
The Ashland Area Chorus, a mix of students and community members, will be accompanied by pianist Susan Gregg during their performance of popular oratorio choruses.
Pieces to be featured are “He, Watching Over Israel” from Felix Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” and the triumphant “Achieved is the Glorious Work” from Joseph Haydn’s “The Creation.”
The AU Choir, comprised of students selected via audition and representing numerous academic majors, will showcase an extended set.
It will include “Sicut Cervus,” a sensitive Latin motet by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina; “Water Night” an expressive and popular piece by modern American composer Eric Whitacre and based on the poetry of Octavio Paz; and “Four Pastorales,” a four-part movement for chorus and flute which was composed by American Cecil Effinger, who based it on the poetry of Thomas Hornsby Ferril.
The flute soloist for “Four Pastorales” will be music major Ashley Ousley.