E G O S P E W

Since 2000, my father, Lindsay, has engaged in a charming tradition usually sometime around Easter, driving cross-country from Arizona to St. James’ Episcopal Church in Montross, Virginia. There, he offers his services as a guest conductor of the Festival Choir while accepting the generous hospitality of the local residents, his old friends and new.

The St. James Festival Chorus

This year, on Sunday April 18, 2010, he will continue that tradition, once again conducting the St. James Festival Choir in a (post-) Easter celebration.  The major work will be The Seven Last Words of Christ, which he composed in 1992 while in Coral Gables, Florida. (That was the period of his first “retirement”, lasting 15 years and including the following positions: music director and organist at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, Coral Gables; guest conductor of the Coral Gables, Florida, Civic Opera and Symphony Society; resident campus carillonneur at the University of Miami; later administrator of the Anne Pohl Lafford Language Laboratory, named in honor of his wife for her contributions to the lab over her eight-year tenure as its director until her death in 1988.) In 1994 he retired again and moved to Tempe, Arizona, his current home, where he devotes most of his energy to music composition and zooming to performances.

The usual cohort of pals will parachute in to Montross, including my soprano-sister Julia Welbon from Philly (inevitably tapped for solo work), tenor-brother Peter from Phoenix,  former students of my father’s (basses and college roommates) D.Dyson Gay from Rochester and hopefully Carl Hye-Knudsen.  Carl and wife Melba, who now live in Bradenton, Florida, were responsible for starting the whole tradition when they lived near Montross in the Northern Neck. I, too, will be joining the St. James Festival Choir as a guest (with a few bars of solo, at the insistence of the composer/conductor, ahem) and, as always, we so much look forward to being with our friends in Virginia.