Cornell choirs spring concert April 29

MOUNT VERNON — Music of North, Central and South America will be featured at the Cornell College spring choral concert Sunday, April 29, at 3 p.m. in King Chapel. The choirs are conducted by associate professor of music Lisa Hearne. Admission is free.

The concert will feature the Chamber Singers, a 24-voice select ensemble, which is preparing for a concert tour to Minneapolis-St. Paul to perform for area high schools and at the Basilica of St. Mary. Their Cornell program will present pieces by leading American choral composer Eric Whitacre and by Cary John Franklin, a Cedar Rapids native now based in Minneapolis. The ensemble will perform Canadian composer Healey Willan’s motet from the Song of Solomon, and a King’s Singers arrangement of Billy Joel’s “And So It Goes.” The ensemble’s portion of the program concludes with “Witness,” a spiritual arranged by Jack Halloran.

Concert Choir will collaborate with members of Pandemonium steel drum band for “Kyrie,” excerpted from “St. Francis in the Americas: A Caribbean Mass” by Glenn McClure and based on a text by St. Francis of Assissi. Pandemonium players are Brady O’Dell, Myka Peterson, Dan Buckingham and Bill Heinrich.

First-year student Paul Worrell is tenor soloist for “Mata del Anima Sola,” a work by Antonia Estevez, based on Venezuelan folk dance music. “Flanders Fields,” set in 1999 by American Paul Aitken, is composed on a text by a Canadian medical officer in World War I whose elegy on the death of his fellow soldiers inspired patriotism and the symbolic wearing of poppies to honor war dead.

Cellist Grant Bierschbach and violinist Dali Cao are featured soloists in “O My Luve’s Like a Red Red Rose” on Robert Burns’ well-known poem, composed by Rene Clausen of Concordia College. The program will close with “Cindy,” the American folk song set for double choir by Mack Wilberg featuring pianists Joyce Strabala and Lynda Hakken, Cornell piano faculty.