The current season closes with group’s new works festival May 11-12

By Jim Flint for Ashland.news

Southern Oregon Repertory Singers, in preparation for their last concert of the current season this May, recently announced the details of their 2024-25 series at a reveal party for donors.

The 2023-24 finale is the James M. Collier Festival of New Choral Works, set for 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 11, and 3 p.m. Sunday, May 12, in the SOU Music Recital Hall, 450 S. Mountain Ave., Ashland.

Featured will be works by the young award-winning composer Alvin Trotman and composer-in-residence Jodi French.

One of today’s emerging voices in classical contemporary composition, Trotman’s music has been commissioned, premiered and performed throughout the United States.

French, who studied with Ashland’s beloved Alexander Tutunov at SOU, continues to be deeply involved with the university’s music department as staff accompanist, informal coach and piano teacher for beginners. She is the Singers’ accompanist and has had several of her sacred works published.

The 2024-25 season

The Rep Singers will perform four concerts in the 2024-25 season, with new starting times for some of the programs.

Matinees next season will be at 2 p.m. instead of 3 p.m., and both holiday concerts in December will be 2 p.m. matinees.

The new season kicks off Nov. 2-3 with “The Heart’s Reflection.”

Music director Paul French says it begins with the thought: “Just as the water reflects the face, so one heart reflects another.

“Expanding on this thought, our concert explores themes of compassion, love of nature, and the yearning of the heart for music and for love.”

The concert will feature poetry by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Federico Garcia Lorca, Robert Burns and Mother Teresa. Music by Johannes Brahms, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Morten Lauridsen will accompany the poems. Also on the program is music based on folk songs from Scotland, Finland, Latin America and Haiti.

Two holiday matinees

“All the Stars Looked Down” is the theme for the holiday concerts, Dec. 21-22.

“The program focuses on images of peace, joy and the magical world of children,” French said.

Featured works will include Caroline Shaw’s “The Children’s Eye,” and John Rutter’s “And all the Stars Looked Down.”

The varied program, with shows at 2 p.m., also will include festive carols, holiday favorites, Andre Thomas’s “African Noel” and Eric Whitacre’s tribute to winter snow, “Glow.”

“Guest instrumentalists will join the 70-voice choir, which will sing music from around the world,” French said.

“Charm Me Asleep” is the title of the season’s third concert, March 15-16.

“It’s the first line of Robert Herrick’s lovely poem, ‘To Music, to Becalm His Fever.’ In it, he celebrates music’s power to transport and renew,” French said.

The concert will explore instances of music’s charming power to induce extraordinary moments, moments of playful flirtation, sensuousness and longing.

Featured works include Franz Schubert’s lyrical “Standchen” (Serenade) for alto soloist and male choir, Samuel Barber’s ethereal “Agnus Dei” (his own arrangement of his famous “Adagio for Strings”), an atmospheric “Requiem” by Icelandic composer Sigurður Sævarsson, and virtuosic spirituals by Adolphus Hailstork, featuring guest soloist Dan Gibbs.

New works next May

The 2024-25 season will culminate May 24-25 with the Collier Festival of New Choral Works. “Cannons Into Bells” will focus on themes of transformation and a compassionate response to human suffering.

“The concert title, and Jodi French’s commissioned cantata of the same name, is taken from Martin Espada’s inspiring poem, ‘Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World,’” French said.

Espada is a Brooklyn-born poet of Puerto Rican extraction and a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

A new work by Joby Talbot, “León,” from his “Path of Miracles,” and Caroline Shaw’s “To the Hands” complete the program.

British composer Talbot has written for a wide variety of purposes with a broad range of styles, including film and television scores. Shaw, an American composer of contemporary classical music, is also a violinist and singer. Her music has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy.

Instrumentalists will join the singers for the concert.

For more information about concerts and to purchase tickets, go to repsingers.org.

Reach writer Jim Flint at jimflint.ashland@yahoo.com.