Handel's Messiah "Magnificent Story"

Update: All tickets have been distributed. Stand by line starts at 6:45.  Empty seats released at 7:15 p.m. If you have tickets you are unable to use please get them to the Heritage Center.  Thanks to all involved.

Orchestra of Southern Utah Invites All to the 78th Performance of Handel’s Messiah

by Tanisa Crosby

        For it’s 78th year the Orchestra of Southern Utah will  an annual holiday tradition of performing a free public concert of Handel’s Messiah.  This year marks the 78th performance, which will take place on December 9th and 10th at the Heritage Center.  This concert is a way for the Orchestra to give back to the community during the holiday season.  Sponsored by the State Bank of Southern Utah and the Leavitt Group, it is free to the public. The OSU musicians and Chorale donate their time for this annual event.

        Over two hundred and fifty years since his death, Handel’s Messiah is still beloved amongst audiences. Premiering in April of 1742, Messiah shares the message found in the passages of the bible and Psalms from telling of the Savior’s birth, life, and hope of the resurrection.  Originally, Handel intended for the piece to be for Easter, but it has since become a Christmas season staple. With the whole first half of the piece is centered upon the birth of Christ, telling the story of Mary, the visitation of angels to the shepherds.  The second half tells more of what the Savior taught, his ultimate sacrifice of the atonement through his death, but that, just as Christ arose from the tomb, we too shall rise.

        It’s become a glorious message of hope, peace, and love for the Christmas season.  As such, it’s also become a beloved by the Orchestra members, sharing a peace and cheer filled message for the Holiday season.

       This performance is dedicated to the memory of Judith Spencer Larsen and Mary MacDonald, both of whom played viola in OSU for many years.

        Messiah will take place on December 9th and 10th at 7:30 pm and will take place at the Heritage Center Theatre (105 N 100 E, Cedar City, UT, located behind Lins). Tickets are free to the public and are now available at the Heritage Center. Empty seats are released at 7:15 p.m.  Children 6 and older are welcome to attend with adult supervision. For more information contact OSU Manager Rebekah Hughes at (435)592-6051 or beckyosucedarcity@gmail.com.

(Poster design by Rollan Fell of the Print Shoppe)

Links:  
Spectrum article on both the St. George and Cedar City performances
Past performance of Good Tidings
2014 Hallelujah
2015 Comfort Ye and Every Valley
Post includes archival programs starting in 1970.

Basics:

Sunday, Dec. 9

Monday, Dec. 10

7:30 p.m.

Heritage Center, 105 N. 100 East in Cedar City

Free and tickets now available from the Heritage Center

Empty seats released at 7:15 p.m.  Stand by line starts at 6:45 p.m.

Age 6 and over welcome with adult supervision. No babies please as the concert is recorded.

Sponsors:

State Bank of Southern Utah and the Leavitt Group

Special thanks to the volunteer services of the Orchestra of Southern Utah musicians and the Chorale

Soloists for 2018:

Comfort Ye - Ethan McBride (tenor)

Every Valley Shall be Exalted - Ethan McBride (tenor)

Thus Saith the Lord - Alex Byers (baritone)

But Who May Abide the Day of His Coming - Alex Byers (baritone)

Behold a Virgin Shall Concieve - Krysten Tomlinson (alto)

O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings To Zion - Krysten Tomlinson (alto)

There Were Shepherds Abiding in The Field - Leslie Perkins (soprano)

And Lo, The Angel of The Lord - Leslie Perkins (soprano)

And the Angel said unto them - Leslie Perkins (soprano)

And Suddenly There Was With the Angel - Leslie Perkins (soprano)

Rejoice Greatly - Terri Metcalf-Petersen (soprano)

Then Shall the Eyes of the Blind be Opene'd - Brooke Alldredge (alto)

He Shall Feed His Flock/Come Unto Him - Brooke Alldredge (alto), Kristina Maggio (soprano)

Why do the Nations so Furiously Rage Together - Alex Byers (baritone)

How Beautiful Are the Feet - Jaclyn Thomas (soprano)

He That Dwelleth in Heaven - Shane Pierce (tenor)

Thou Shalt Break Them - Shane Pierce (tenor)

I Know That My Redeemer Liveth - Emily Diamond (soprano)

Behold, I Tell You a Mystery - Richard Waldron (baritone/bass) Richard McMaster (trumpet)

The Trumpet Shall Sound - Richard Waldron (baritone/bass)

More information:

Rebekah Hughes

Phone: (435) 592-6051

Email:  beckyosucedarcity@gmail.com

Live Music for Cedar City

OSU musicians participate in numerous community events.  Here are a few photos from the State Bank of Southern Utah event in Nov. and the STEAM Festival at SUU.









Thanks to everyone who participates in OSU as a musician, in the audience, backstage, support staff and a special shout out to our financial supporters who help us keep the music flowing.  Donations welcome and tax deductible:
OSU
P.O. Box 312
Cedar City, UT 84721


STEAM Festival at SUU in October exploring the science of sound.

Des Penny helped show students the science of sound with Anna Englestead assisting.

Musicians and volunteer Pam Littlefield helped the children make straw oboes

Desmond Penny  and Brooke MacNaughtan showed the students how wave motion creates harmonics

Timeless Drama Review

Beauty Beyond Time, Beyond Place

By Bryce Christensen

“Any great art work,” declared the great composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, “ . . . revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world—the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.”  Exulting in that “strange, special air,” hundreds of music lovers gathered in Cedar City’s Heritage Center on the night of November 8^th for a concert performed by the Orchestra of Southern Utah (OSU) in celebration of the centennial of Bernstein’s birth.  Aptly devoted to the theme “Timeless Drama,” this concert compellingly reminded listeners of the marvelous timelessness of Bernstein’s musical readaptation of time and space. But during the evening’s program, OSU’s talented musicians also demonstrated to listeners that great composers besides Bernstein have shared his power to revive and readapt time in ways that draw listeners into delightful new worlds.

Indeed, even before the evening’s concert began, local pianist Cody Stratton had set the tone for the evening with lobby music that defied the limits of time and space, blending together a musical potpourri of classical music and his own delightful creations.  Carrying listeners out of the concert hall to a sylvan world beneath the stars, Stratton’s “Campfire Bird” especially prepared listeners for an evening of musical transports.  

In welcoming the audience to the concert, OSU president Harold Shirley first focused on the music written by Leroy Anderson,  a 20^th-century American composer who shared with his more famous contemporary Bernstein a great power to revive and readapt time and space.  Fittingly, Shirley promised that the two Anderson compositions the orchestra was about to play would stir nostalgia as they took listeners back to the simpler and less factious America of Fifties.

While listening to Anderson’s “Blue Tango,” many in the audience might well have sworn they were back in Manhattan Center in 1952 when Hugo Winterhalter and his orchestra launched this composition into enduring fame.  Named for a dance renowned for the close embrace maintained by couples performing it, this number became a harmonic tango that kept flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, trombones, violins, violas, cellos, and all of the other instruments very close in an exacting musical choreography rendered deceptively effortless.  OSU assistant conductor Adam Lambert demonstrated superb skill in wielding the baton keeping the entire orchestra in perfect synchrony. Somewhere the shade of Winterhalter must have looked down--and listened in--with warm approval.  Swaying in sympathetic response to the exotic rhythms revived and readapted from an earlier era, many in the 21^st-century audience would have leaped to the dance floor had one been open to them. 

In turning next to Anderson’s “Belle of the Ball,” the orchestra maintained the dance theme, but did so while reviving and readapting a very different time and place.  Explaining that in “Belle of the Ball” he had sought to recapture the enchantment of Viennese waltzes, Anderson gave Lambert and the musicians under his direction a number that drew from the strains of Strauss and other masters of the waltz the beguiling inspiration for ethereal elegance, melodious and otherworldly.  Long a mainstay of the repertoire of the Boston Pops, Anderson’s “Belle” afforded Lambert and the Orchestra of Southern Utah an opportunity to do a collective impersonation of the famous Boston orchestra that was every bit as convincing as their previous impersonation of Winterhalter’s ensemble!  Leaving an enraptured audience unsure whether they were in 21^st-century Cedar City, 20^th- century Manhattan or Boston, or 19^th-century Vienna, OSU delivered both Anderson standards in all their enthralling loveliness. 

Time and space yielded to artistic wizardry in a different fashion in the concert’s final pre-intermission number--Antonio Capuzzi’s Concerto in D Major.  As Shirley explained in his prefatory remarks, this time-dissolving work conveys the brilliance of a musical era when the Baroque metamorphosed into the Classical.   Originally written in Italy for the double bass, this selection captured the audience as the occasion for a remarkable solo performance by trombonist Michelle Lambert.  With admirable poise and skill, Lambert rendered every 18^th-century flourish with 21^st century verve.  Lambert moved from the profound depths of her instrument’s lower register into the mellower tones of its higher notes with liquid grace.  Particularly brilliant in the kinetic final measures, Lambert’s singular virtuosity captivated all who heard it. But perhaps no one found greater pleasure in hearing her memorable solo than did the man on the conductor’s platform:  Adam Lambert, whose identity as the soloist’s husband made him the ideal conductor for this number.   Never were musical and marital concord more beautifully joined!

In welcoming concertgoers back to the hall after intermission, Shirley spoke glowingly of the composer especially honored this night: Leonard Bernstein.  Bernstein, Shirley explained, was a composer whose genius could not be hidden, even during an era of McCarthyist hysteria and cowardice.

That genius shone brightly as the orchestra performed Bernstein’s Overture to ‘Candide,’ a composition demonstrating how the composer’s art could revive and readapt the imaginative vision of the Enlightenment satirist Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet).   Taken from a light opera based on a mercilessly ironic novel by the French philosopher, Bernstein’s overture readapted the time and space of an Enlightenment satire in the dynamic rhythms of 20^th-century drama, so exposing the hypocrisies and deceptions of the composer’s own time. Under the always-impassioned and inspiring baton of OSU conductor Xun Sun, OSU’s percussion section rose to the challenge of the complex rhythms of this daunting number, as drums and cymbals together played off the rest of the orchestra, taut with the irresistible energy of its cadences.  As the concert hall pulsed with the sprightliness of this ever-popular work, concert-goers occupied a time and place stunningly distant from modern Iron County. 

But Bernstein’s skill in reviving and readapting time and space manifested itself most spectacularly in the evening’s final number:  just as enchanting in 2018 as it was when first performed more than sixty years ago, Bernstein’s music for Symphonic Dances from West Side Story dazzled listeners as it revived and readapted the time and space that once were Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, reconceived as inter-ethnic romance in a blue-collar neighborhood in 20^th-century New York City.  In the soaring lyricism of “Tonight,” listeners thrilled to that incomparable moment when young love first knows itself.   In the stirring Latin rhythms of “Maria,” they shared a passion transcending ethnic prejudice.  In “America,” they felt anew the irresistible appeal of a land that nurtures lofty aspirations; and in “One Hand, One Heart,” they joined in the tender hopes of a vulnerable couple anticipating marriage, blissfully unaware of the tragedy awaiting them.  Under Sun’s versatile directing, the OSU instrumentalists performed all of the iconic passages from Bernstein’s West Side score with a sureness of interpretive touch that put the audience back in time to 1957 and away in geography to Broadway, where Bernstein’s genius helped make this play a blockbuster.

At the evening’s close, as concert-goers filed out of the Heritage Center, they reflected on how a half-dozen musical numbers, unforgettably performed, had transported them to readapted times and spaces, making them happy if temporary inhabitants of astonishing imaginative realms outside of their habitual chronology and geography.  These satisfied concert-goers felt deeply indebted to Xun Sun, Adam Lambert, Michelle Lambert and all the other OSU performers, and the Sorenson Legacy Foundation and other concert sponsors for having afforded them the opportunity to experience the air of a rare Cedar City night in November as something intoxicatingly strange and special. 

Concert photos click here

Music "names the feelings for us, only in notes instead of words" Leonard Bernstein

Harold Shirley introduces the concert.

Thanks to everyone involved in the Nov. 8, 2018 concert.  We appreciate the musicians, audience, and financial supporters who help us keep the music live.
Concert review link

(Thanks to Rollan Fell, Rebekah Hughes, Sara and Des Penny for photos)

Adam and Michelle Lambert with Xun Sun at intermission.

Xun Sun directing Bernstein pieces, photo by Rebekah Hughes.

Cody Stratton provided lobby music.

Adam Lambert directing the LeRoy Anderson pieces

Michelle Lambert performs trombone concerto by Capuzzi.

Michelle receives flowers after performance. 

Dress rehearsal

Backstage

Backstage

Librarian Mandy Minkler keeping track of all of that music.

Part of the lobby display, a vintage Bernstein book

"Music moves . . That movement can tell us more about the way we feel than a million words can," Leonard Bernstein

Thanks to the financial donors who help OSU.  If you see any errors please contact Rebekah Hughes at beckyosucedarcity@gmail.com