Mad River Chorale
Serving our Community Through Song
The Mad River Chorale (MRC) has been inspiring singers and audiences for over 30 years. We are a welcoming non-auditioned community chorus that performs concerts twice a year, in December and in the Spring. The MRC’s goal is to provide members an opportunity to sing a rewarding and challenging repertoire and to give our audience the experience of, and knowledge about, wonderful choral music.
At our two May Spring Concerts, the MRC performs with the South Burlington Community Chorus (SBCC) accompanied by strings, harp, and piano. On Friday, May 10th at 7:30 pm, the concert will be at Elley-Long Music Center in Colchester. On Sunday, May 12th at 4 pm, the concert will be at the Green Mountain Valley School in Fayston. Click the appropriate button below to purchase tickets for the concert you want to attend. At both concerts, tickets will also be available at the door.
Our program at both concerts features two works each by Mozart and Fauré: a work composed by each in their youth and then a work composed by each as a mature composer. We end with a beautiful song by Leonard Bernstein that was featured in the recent movie, Maestro, by Bradley Cooper.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791)
Te Deum laudamus (KV 141): The title, translated as “Thee God, we praise”, refers to the full text of a standard Latin liturgy. Mozart set this text to music at the age of 13!
Ave verum corpus (KV 618): “Hail, true body” is a Communion hymn composed in the year of his early death at the age of 35. Mozart composed this short work while also working on his opera, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute).
Gabriel Urbain Fauré (1845 – 1924)
Cantique de Jean Racine (Op.11): Jean Racine was a 17th-century French playwright who paraphrased a Latin Hymn into French that begins, “Verbe égal au Très-Haut” or “Word, one with the Highest”. Fauré set this text to music at age 19 for a competition at the École Niedermeyer de Paris, a school for church music where he studied. He won first prize!
Requiem (Op. 48): Fauré composed this variation of the traditional funeral Mass when he was in his 40’s. Having earned his living as an organist, he is quoted as saying that for his Requiem he “sought to escape from what is thought right and proper, after all the years of accompanying burial services on the organ! I know it all by heart. I wanted to write something different.”
Leonard Bernstein (1918 – 1990)
Bernstein composed “Make Our Garden Grow” as the concluding song for the operetta, Candide (1956) based on the 1759 novella by Voltaire. The arrangement we will sing is by Robert Page. The song concludes the operetta with the words, “And let us try before we die to make some sense of life…and make our garden grow.”
