Dr. Stanley Roberts leads a Coro Vocati rehearsal. (Pictures courtesy of Coro Vocati)
The Atlanta choral ensemble’s new creative director talks a couple of new season, which begins October 18.
Once I final spoke to Mercer College affiliate dean and professor of choral conducting Dr. Stanley Roberts, he was getting ready to look as visitor conductor at Coro Vocati’s Could efficiency of Two Rivers: A Journey By means of Life’s Contrasts. On the time, he was certainly one of a rotating slate of visitor conductors following the retirement of Founding Conductor John Dixon. Fortune has smiled on Roberts within the months since, and he’ll now take the stage because the choir’s newly confirmed creative director and conductor.
“I used to be thrilled to have the chance to come back in and put that live performance collectively for them,” he says of the live performance that marked 15 years of the chamber choir’s operation. In hindsight, he views the audition facet of the live performance as an afterthought. “Clearly, they have been in search of somebody, nevertheless it was by no means introduced to me as an audition. The board met over the summer time, known as and mentioned ‘What’s the likelihood that you just’d be the creative director?’”
Now ensconced in his new place, Roberts appears ahead to kicking off Coro Vocati’s upcoming 2025-26 season, which can comply with the ensemble’s traditional set of three live shows — one every for fall, winter and spring. As is customary for Coro Vocati, the packages purpose to supply conceptual frameworks that transcend mere choral performances. The season opens with An American Panorama: The Joys of Our Spirit, with performances on October 18 and October 19.
“We’re choosing up on Walt Whitman poems from Leaves of Grass,” explains Roberts. To that finish, this system emphasizes comparatively modern American composers with works by fashionable masters Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber standing alongside these by the nonetheless energetic Eric Whitacre and René Clausen.
“There’s a bit of little bit of Americana taste to it,” says Roberts of the present’s folksy undercurrents.
On condition that certainly one of Coro Vocati’s most excellent claims to fame is that it premiered Craig Hella Johnson’s Contemplating Matthew Shepard, a meditation on the homicide of homosexual 21-year-old Matthew Shepard. I’m curious to know if the “Americana” theme of the upcoming present was equally socially acutely aware.
“The programming isn’t a lot set to make some sort of political assertion,” Roberts replies. “For this live performance particularly, I have a look at it because the musical components that bind us. A few of these musical gems have been part of the material of the American choral life through the years. It’s a manner of us coming collectively extra so than simply making a political assertion.”
However, that coming collectively at a time when the nation stays so bitterly divided carries a political weight all its personal, and Roberts is fast to concur. “You’ll find in any ensemble you conduct, whether or not it’s a college ensemble or a church choir or knowledgeable choir, that you just oftentimes could have your entire spectrum of thought sitting in entrance of you,” he says of the various array of mind-sets and walks of life that come collectively in a given choir. “It’s this glorious alternative we’ve as conductors to work inside that framework of discovering that which is frequent: our frequent humanity, our frequent goodness.”
On December 13 and December 14, the choir will probably be performing Christmas With Coro Vocati: Songs of Surprise, Hope and Pleasure. “That live performance will probably be very accessible for anybody within the household,” says Roberts. The live performance will run the gamut from modern, jazzy modern numbers to classic Christmas materials. Most notable will probably be works by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina in honor of the composer’s five hundredth birthday. “Palestrina is extensively thought-about to be the peak of the Renaissance choir.”
Coro Vocati returns to the bucolic Could 2 and Could 3 for its third and last program of the season, Grime Roads and Footpaths. For Roberts, the pastoral imagery was rooted in his origins as a south Georgia farmboy and the way the lengthy winding grime roads of his youth grew to become a metaphor for the journeys we absorb life.
Some 40 years after that upbringing, Roberts was in England to attend the Three Choirs Pageant in Gloucester. In that point, he discovered himself spending free time wandering down the various footpaths in England’s Lake District. These meditative walks fashioned the idea for Grime Roads and Footpaths. Central to the live performance will probably be John Corigliano’s setting of Dylan Thomas’ poem Fern Hill.
I can’t assist however suppose the Grime Roads and Footpaths idea carries extra of that socially acutely aware undercurrent. Roberts is fast to concur. “Some days you’re on the trail and having fun with the journey, and typically you’re known as to assist keep the trail for these which are coming behind you,” he affirms.
Regardless of the conceptual framework that units Coro Vocati aside from its friends, Roberts is at the beginning enthusiastic in regards to the ensemble he’ll be working with. “It’s an excellent alternative for me as a conductor,” he beams. “To work with this degree of musician who has an unimaginable eagerness to dig deeper into their choral artwork … there’s nothing they’ll’t do. This choir can sing something.”
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Jordan Owen started writing about music professionally on the age of 16 in Oxford, Mississippi. A 2006 graduate of the Berklee Faculty of Music, he’s knowledgeable guitarist, bandleader and composer. He’s at the moment the lead guitarist for the jazz group Different Strangers, the facility metallic band Axis of Empires and the melodic dying/thrash metallic band Century Spawn.