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2011/2012 Season

The program will open with three a cappella American works: the traditional By The Waters of Babylon, Virgil Thompson's "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need" and Ross Lee Finney's "Words To Be Spoken". Each of these pieces is quintessentially American in voice, suggesting at once strength and conviction, wonder and vulnerability. Fauré's Requiem is perhaps the lightest of the well-known Requiem settings. It is a work of tenderness and comfort, pervaded by light. It is tuneful and direct, ending with music of ethereal beauty and promise.

Home for the Holidays will be a concert of mostly a cappella holiday favorites, including traditional hymns and carols and new arrangements of songs like "O Holy Night". The concert will conclude with Ralph Vaughan Williams's charming and powerful "Fantasia on Christmas Carols". In December PMC will be releasing a recording of Christmas music, a companion piece to this concert.

Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil is a pinnacle of a cappella choral music. A setting of the Russian Orthodox vigil liturgy, the work is monolithic in scope and conception. Sung in the original Slavonic language, the All-Night Vigil (also commonly referred to as the Rachmaninoff Vespers) is divided into 15 separate movements and lasts over an hour. The music is sumptuous - melodies based on the original chants of the orthodox church woven around thick ringing 12-part harmonies. A deeply devout man, Rachmaninoff penned the work in just over two weeks in 1915, and it has the feeling of a single continuous thought. The composer left Russia shortly after completing the piece. He never returned to his homeland, but lived the remainder of his life in Hollywood. The ending of the last piece he composed, the Symphonic Dances (1943), quotes directly from the All-Night Vigil. This work was an emotional touchstone for him, signifying his homeland and his faith.