The winter holiday season has been inspiring gorgeous music and poetry for centuries. This weekend, Fredericksburg residents have an opportunity to hear a more recent result of that inspiration at the Chamber Chorale of Fredericksburg’s winter concert.
“A Winter Day” is a 2018 composition by Canadian composer Sarah Quartel that sets text by poet Sarah Teasdale and authors Lucy Maud Montgomery and Melville Cane to music. The five movements take listeners through a winter day, from pre-dawn darkness to nightfall.
“It’s a 17-minute work with cello and choir and it’s really cool, with all these poems connecting winter themes,” said Joe Eveler, artistic director of the Chamber Chorale.
The chorale performs one major work at each of its annual concerts, “which not a lot of community choirs do at the Christmas season,” Eveler said.
The group is excited to sharing Quartel’s composition, along with other seasonal music both serious and lighthearted, on Saturday.
The chorale is celebrating its 34th season, said Eveler, who has sung with the group since 2003 and has been artistic director since 2021.
“The idea when it was formed in 1989 was to have a small, very select group of singers to perform really quality choral music,” Eveler said. “We’ve grown in size (from 16 to 34 singers) but our mission is still the same – to take the really challenging, advanced repertoire that you might want to drive up to D.C. or down to Richmond to hear and bring it to Fredericksburg.”
The chorale hosts auditions twice a year in August and January, as well as on a rotating basis to fill slots that might open up. Members include many local school and church choir directors who love singing, enjoy challenging themselves and want to share the resulting music with the community.
The group presents concerts in the fall, winter and spring, each with a theme that is sometimes broad – like “Sounds of the Season” – and sometimes very specific, such as this fall’s concert, which was called “A British Invasion.”
“So we featured British composers – we did some Beatles tunes and some Ralph Vaughn Williams and everything in between,” Eveler said. “We try to reach across the generations and do things from the classical area up through the present. We want to do the serious stuff but also the crowd-pleasing stuff.
We’ve been making music here in Fredericksburg for 34 years and we just want to get the word out to come hear the music that we’re making. We really enjoy it and we want the community to hear us!”
Want to go?
What: The Chamber Chorale of Fredericksburg presents “Sounds of the Season”
When: Saturday, December 17 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.
Where: Fredericksburg Baptist Church, 1019 Princess Anne Street
More info: Tickets ($15/adult and $5/student) are available at the door or in advance at ccfbg.org.
by Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
