St. Charles Singers Conclude Season With MUSIC FOR A WHILE in Chicago Tonight, 5/19

The St. Charles Singers will conclude its twenty-eighth concert season this month when founder and artistic director Jeffrey Hunt leads the professional chamber choir in a program of soothing sounds for spring titled "Music for a While."

The St. Charles Singers will present "Music for a While" at 7:30 p.m. tonight, May 19, 2012, at Baker Memorial United Methodist Church, 307 Cedar Ave., St. Charles; and at 7 p.m. Sunday, May 20, at St. Michael Catholic Church, 310 S. Wheaton Ave., Wheaton.

The internationally recognized mixed-voice ensemble will sing calming compositions on springtime themes - life's pleasures, romantic love, and the delights of the natural world.

The St. Charles Singers' season-finale program takes its title from a song by English Baroque composer Henry Purcell about music's ability to lift the spirits. The song opens with the words, "Music for a while/Shall all your cares beguile."

Concertgoers will spend a while with songs by Arthur Baynon, Benjamin Britten, Stuart Churchill, William Dawson, James Erb, Gabriel Fauré, Ola Gjeilo, Nils Lindberg, Cecilia McDowall, Claudio Monteverdi, Joseph Twist, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Tomás Luis de Victoria.

The choir will perform two colorful "Choral Dances" from Britten's opera "Gloriana," Op. 53: "Country Girls," for sopranos and altos, and "Rustics and Fishermen" for tenors and basses.

The program salutes the season of love with Churchill's arrangement of the Appalachian folk song "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair."

The choir will sing "Not, Cecilia that I juster am" from Lindberg's suite of Elizabethan English poetry titled "O, Mistress Mine," written by the Swedish composer in 1988.

McDowall's "A Fancy of Folk Songs," from 2003, includes charming settings of four English folk songs. The composer describes the songs as a "joyful celebration of youthful love and courtship."

Twist's "On the Night Train," from 2006, will take listeners on an evocative moonlit ride under "a mystic sky" through his native Australia's remote, isolated bush country.

Vaughan Williams's Mass in G Minor is among his more contemplative and otherworldly creations. Its "Gloria" movement unleashes the full harmonic power of the choral forces.

Audiences will hear Baynon's "When Rooks Fly Homeward," Dawson's Black American spiritual "Soon Ah Will Be Done," Erb's "Shenandoah," Fauré's "Cantique de Jean Racine," Gjeilo's "Prelude," Monteverdi's "Lamento D'Arianna," Purcell's "Hear My Prayer, O Lord," and Victoria's "Pange Lingua."

Harpist Stephen Hartman will perform Stephen Paulus's "A Summer's Love," a solo instrumental version of a love duet from the composer's opera "Summer." The harpist also will perform with the choir in the works by Fauré, McDowall, and Churchill.

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