E G O S P E W

My next appearance on stage will be as a soldier and wedding guest (i.e. chorus member) in this production of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte.  Get giddy.

Cosi Fan Tutte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Friday & Saturday July 30 & 31, 2010

Smith Opera House

Geneva, NY

My next concert, in the Hobart & William Smith Colleges Community Chorus,  Tuesday, April 13th, 8:00 pm, St. John’s Chapel, 630 S. Main Street, Geneva, NY 14456.

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.

Haydn's The Creation: Concert December 1st

It’s time once again for a concert by the Hobart and William Smith Community Chorus.  We will be honoring the 200th anniversary of Franz Joseph Haydn’s death with a production of The Creation, his wonderful oratorio.  It has been one of my favorite pieces since childhood (more organic and transcendent than the other one by that George Frideric dude, IMHO).

To do it justice, the director Deanna Joseph, with the support of the HWS Music Department and Bob Cowles, not to mention cash contributions from the choir itself, have pulled together a production including, besides the HWSCC, the Colleges Chorale, a full orchestra, organ, and hotshot paid soloists.  Many of the individuals are drawn from the truly impressive ranks of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, where Deanna is completing her PhD.  As I said in the poster, it will be “a Magnificent Collaboration of 125 Choral and Orchestral Musicians”.

It has been wonderful finally getting to sing in a piece that has lifted me without fail over many decades.  Please come and enjoy it.  And thanks, F.J.

I will be appearing (a little song , a little dance) in the title role (i.e. Jury member, aka chorus) of G&S’s first big Savoy Opera.  Curtain is at 8:00 PM this Friday and Saturday at the Smith Opera House in Geneva.  (Interesting note:  my first job out of college was in the very same theatre as a union carbon-arc projectionist in a previous life.)