MOUNT VERNON — As an Eastern Illinois University freshman, Lisa Hearne performed with the college’s choir in Europe. That trip changed her life.
Hearne, now director of Cornell College’s Chamber Singers, believes the same could be true for the 46 Cornell musicians who will soon tour Europe. “It gave me a perspective I didn’t get as a farm girl from Illinois,” she says. “That’s why I’m excited about this opportunity, because I know it will change lives.”
Hearne and her husband, Martin Hearne, director of Cornell’s Chamber Orchestra, are taking select students from their two groups for a four-country tour May 8-22. The trip is the heart of a Music in Europe course during the ninth term on Cornell’s One-Course-At-A-Time calendar, where students study a single subject for a 3 ½-week term.
The tour will include performances in cathedrals, concert halls and churches in Florence and Venice, Italy; Graz, Salzburg and Vienna, Austria; and Prague, the Czech Republic. The groups were selected to perform at a major music festival at Marostica, outside Venice. The tour concludes in Munich, Germany.
Students will perform music by American composers such as Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, Randall Thompson and Morton Gould, as well as spirituals and jazz. They will perform Mozart during the main service at the Salzburg cathedral, where Mozart spent his formative years, and music by Italian composers in their home cities.
“We realize we have a lot of pressure on us in some of the venues,” Lisa Hearne says.
Alto Nichole Strutt, 20, a junior from McGregor, is especially looking forward to singing in the church where the character Maria was married in the movie “The Sound of Music.”
“We have been working on a variety of great music,” she says. “Being able to perform it in Europe is just a bonus.”
This is the first time the Hearnes have taken the orchestra and choir to Europe. In 1999 they took Cornell’s steel drum band Pandemonium and the Calypso Singers to France, where they were the only U.S. band that performed by invitation at Carnival 1999 in Nice.
“This is a particularly good group, not just in the sense of musicianship, but they’re good people,” Martin Hearne says. “They’ll be good ambassadors, not just of the college, but of the United States.”
The tour has been two years in the making. Martin Hearne says he is particularly interested in the students seeing Venice. “There’s something magical about Venice,” he says. “When you step off the train … it’s as if you’ve entered another time.”
Mary Drexler, 22, a senior from Clarence who plays the bassoon in the orchestra and sings soprano in the choir, calls the Hearnes “the two finest directors I have ever had.” Both Drexler and Erin Burnight, a junior voice student from Sioux City, are especially looking forward to singing in the Salzburg cathedral.
“What a great opportunity,” Drexler says.