If there’s a ground zero of American classical music, it just might be Boston, which once had a front-row seat for the emergence of a distinctive national voice within the classical idiom that bridged the gap with rigid European Romanticism. Cultivating that voice in the late 1800s was a sextet of seminal composers dubbed the “Boston Six.”
The Bach Festival Chamber Choir and Orchestra will pay tribute to that hugely influential movement with a retrospective performance of works by the six major players in what is more formally known as the Second New England School: John Knowles Paine, Horatio Parker, Edward MacDowell, Amy Marcy Beach, George Whitefield Chadwick and Arthur Foote.
Visionaries who worked separately but toward a common goal, they’re today remembered for setting up the nation’s earliest university music departments and composing complex symphonies that proved American artists could match the artistic weight of their forebears from Europe.
Set for Friday, November 13, at 7:30 p.m. in the John M. Tiedtke Concert Hall at Rollins College, the concert will feature the 36-member chamber choir (a specialized ensemble of the larger Bach Festival Choir), alongside the 15-member chamber orchestra. The conductor will be, of course, Dr. John V. Sinclair.
Highlights of the program will include selections from Parker’s Hora Novissima and Beach’s Three Browning Songs, Opus 44, the latter sung by soloist Caitlin Mohr, soprano, an associate professor of music at the college whose voice critics have described as “sparkling” and “powerful and expressive.”
Says Sinclair: “The music of the Boston Six offers a look into the birth of American classical music. Performing their music today allows us to rediscover the elegant and well-crafted music from the late 19th century.”
Rollins College is located at 1000 Holt Avenue, Winter Park. For more information, call or visit the website.
