Sunday, April 16, 2023, 7:30 pm
The annual spring Sandy Sanborn Martin Memorial Concert is forthcoming on Sunday, April 16, 7:30 PM at Calvary Episcopal Church in Cincinnati, and everyone is warmly invited! The full Cincinnati Fusion Ensemble professional choir will perform under the direction of Gwen Coleman and Howard Helvey, and in collaboration with pianist Brad Caldwell and guest organist Bradley Hunter Welch. Also featured will be the Cincinnati Boychoir Ambassadors under the direction of Jason Alexander Holmes (who will also be singing with CFE!).
CFE choral repertoire will include Francis Poulenc’s Litanies à la Vierge Noire (Litany to the Black Virgin), an evocative work from 1936 for women’s voices and organ; selections from Johannes Brahms’ lively Zigeunerlieder (Gypsy songs); a set of anthems, by composer/conductor Howard Helvey, celebrating renewal and resurrection; and three lyrical (but rarely-heard) late-19th-century works by the distinguished British Anglo-African composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
The Cincinnati Boychoir Ambassadors will perform a work, Ngothando (a song written in the IsiZulu language, calling for universal love), by South African composer Mbuso Ndlovu, and a classic arrangement by André Thomas of the Traditional Spiritual, Keep your lamps!
Calvary’s historic Skinner/Quimby pipe organ will sing out under the internationally-renowned artistry of Bradley Hunter Welch with music by Marcel Dupré (the spectacular Prelude and Fugue in B Major), and shorter works by Raymond Haan, Lynnwood Farnam, and Frederick Swann. Visiting from Dallas, Texas, Dr. Welch is Resident Organist, Lay Family Chair, of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and Artist-in-Residence at Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church.
Calvary Church is so very grateful to Sanford Martin and the Greater Cincinnati Foundation for underwriting this concert.
No tickets are required, and the concert is free to all, but a $20 donation is suggested, which will be applied to CFE’s education initiatives. A reception will follow.
