William McCorkle will offer two keyboard concerts in December as part of the occasional Music at Noon series at Lexington Presbyterian Church. The concerts will take place on two Thursdays, Dec. 11 and 18.
The Dec. 11 program will present organ music based on hymns for Advent and Christmas, with works by noted musicians of the European tradition J.S. Bach, Helmut Walcha, Marcel Dupré, and Max Reger - as well as Americans Margaret Sandresky and Richard Purvis. Hymn tunes featured will be the Reformation tune “Genevan 42” (from the Calvinist tradition), also known as “Freu dich sehr, O meine Seele” (in the Lutheran tradition), which is generally sung to the text “Comfort, Comfort Ye, My People;” and the Lutheran Reformation tune “Nun komm der heiden Heiland” (“Savior of the Nations, Come”). The American composers’ offerings will include treatments of a number of familiar carols.
On Dec. 18, McCorkle will turn to the piano to present what has become an annual tradition: a selection of extemporaneous improvisations on Christmas melodies.
The Music at Noon series of half-hour concerts has been offered for decades at Lexington Presbyterian Church, and often presents music corresponding to the church year. Many concerts display the church’s C.B. Fisk pipe organ, opus 128 (2007).
