Choral Society Veterans Return For Saturday Gala
This Saturday, April 18, at 7 p.m., the Rockbridge Choral Society invites the community to Wilson Concert Hall at Washington and Lee University’s Lenfest Center for the Arts for a milestone celebration: the 50th Anniversary Gala Concert and Reception.
Since the formation of the Rockbridge Chorus in 1975 as part of Fine Arts In Rockbridge, the Rockbridge Choral Society has been the musical heartbeat of the Lexington community — bringing together amateur singers from all walks of life to perform choral music of the highest caliber, from Renaissance masterworks to contemporary compositions. The anniversary excitement is heightened by this year’s observance of 25 years of singing by the Rockbridge Youth Chorale.
The evening will bring together all three of the Society’s performing groups — the Rockbridge Chorus, the Rockbridge Chamber Singers, and the Rockbridge Youth Chorale — for a sweeping retrospective of the music that has defined five decades of choral excellence in the Valley. Conductors and singers from the organization’s history are expected to return for the occasion, making it a true reunion of the RCS family.
Founding Rockbridge Chorus conductor Gordon Spice, who will join McCorkle and associate director Scott Williamson in conducting the concert, said the group came together with the help of the entire community. “The Choral Society was born out of a community effort,” Spice said. “People got together and decided that it would be good to have a community chorus. And look at the group’s magnificent half-century of music-making!”
The program will sample the wide range of the ensemble’s repertoire of major oratorios, opera, folk music, seasonal works, and pops. There will be excerpts from the ensemble’s yearly major-work performances with orchestra and soloists, made possible since 2000 by the generosity of The Friends of the Rockbridge Choral Society.
Singing with the Chorus will be a constellation of guest soloists, including longtime collaborators, soprano Christine Fairfield, mezzo-sopranos Barbara Hollinshead and Christine Schadeberg, tenors Scott Williamson and Robert Petillo, and bass-baritone Keith Spencer, as well as other vocalists who have come to work with the Chorus in recent years, tenor Adam Williams, baritone Charles Blueweiss, and soprano Asherah Capellaro.
Pianists Timothy Gaylard and Joshua Harvey, each of who has a long history of music-making with the Chorus, will provide instrumental collaboration, joined by Anna Billias, longtime keyboardist for the RYC, (and a former director of the RYC Children’s Chorus), and by Daniel Brinson, another significant collaborator.
The RYC, led by artistic director Lacey Lynch, Children’s Choir director Katelyn Roll, and four college student conducting interns, will perform pieces from their recent spring concert, and will be joined by the adult chorus in a chorus from Verdi’s opera “Nabucco,” which the Youth Chorale first performed about 20 years ago. Melanie Griffis, the first conductor and organizer of the RYC, will conduct the collaborative piece.
Said McCorkle, “Part of the fun of choosing pieces to represent different eras of the ensemble’s history has been our ability to reunite with soloists from those earlier performances. Keith Spencer, one of our most frequent guests, will reprise Bizet’s famous ‘Toreador Song’ from ‘Carmen,’ one of his solos from one of our opera programs some 20 years ago.
“We will feature soprano Fairfield in a movement from Poulenc’s ‘Gloria,’ one of her most memorable appearances with us, 15 years ago,” Mc-Corkle continued. “Veteran collaborators Hollinshead and Petillo, who have sung numerous Handel works with us, will add ‘Messiah’ to that list. Duo-pianists Brinson and Harvey, whose friendship developed during a period of frequent collaborations with our Chorus, will reclaim a few pieces from Brahms’s ‘Liebeslieder Waltzes,’ which they first performed with the Rockbridge Chamber Singers.”
Longtime chorus member and librarian Anne Sauder, who, as a high school student, sang in the group’s opening season, observed, “Choosing music for this concert has brought us to remember many singers who are no longer with us. Looking at photographs of past performances. we see over and over again the faces of cherished friends and fellow singers, who found musical and artistic fulfillment, and also deep fellowship, in their years in our midst. Pictures of past Youth Chorale groups feature singers for whom singing was a special part of their growing up in our community. A number of them have continued to sing in college and beyond. The foundational work of all these past singers has empowered our ongoing growth and success.”
The concert also marks 15 years of the RCS as a formal nonprofit organization — 15 years of underwriting performances, nurturing young singers through the Youth Chorale, and ensuring that world-class choral music remains a vital part of life in the Shenandoah Valley, said McCorkle.
The gala is the RCS’s premier fundraising event of the year, and the proceeds directly support the singers, directors, and programs that make the music possible. A reception will follow the concert, offering guests the chance to celebrate with the performers and one another.
Tickets, at $50, for the gala concert fundraiser are available online at the RCS website: rcs.org.
FOUNDING Rockbridge Youth Chorale director Melanie Griffis leads a 2002 performance in the Washington and Lee University Chapel.
