Carols and Lullabies
Music for the holiday season
Saturday, December 17, at 7:30 pm
St. Andrew's Cathedral, Honolulu, HI
The Oʻahu Choral Society presents a warm and moving celebration of the holiday season, with the Honolulu Symphony Chorus and Honolulu Chamber Choir, Esther S. Yoo conducting. Featured works include Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols and Conrad Susa's Carols and Lullabies, along with familiar carols in which the audience can join. The singers will be accompanied by Rebecca Walker, harp; Lusha Anthony, marimba; and Byron Yasui, guitar.
Written in 1942, Britten's Ceremony of Carols is based on English carols and poems, mostly dating from the 15th and 16th centuries, set for chorus with harp accompaniment. Britten composed the work during a wartime sea voyage home to Britain from America, using texts from an anthology of English poems that he had stumbled upon in a Halifax, Nova Scotia, bookshop. It was premiered the following Christmas in Norwich, England. With effective use of unison, canon and homophonic writing, Britten achieves an impressive range of color and texture in a work that captures the essence of an English Christmas.
Conrad Susa's Carols and Lullabies (subtitled Christmas in the Southwest) is a Nativity celebration of the Americas, adding guitar and marimba to Britten's harp and including a medley of traditional Spanish carols from Spain, Mexico and Puerto Rico. Parts are sung in Spanish, Catalán, and (sometimes) English. It was commissioned as a companion piece to the Ceremony of Carols, and was first performed in 1992.
Tickets are now on sale!
$20 general admission, $15 for military and students with ID.
Contact us for further information!
