Whether you regularly attend or not, these classical music performances, all featuring voices and all set in churches, look to uplift you with mortal music of otherworldly beauty.
Chopin and Yeats at Church in the Forest
Pianist Melinda Coffey and bard/orator Taelen Thomas teamed up to pair the piano music of Frederic Chopin with the love poems of William Butler Yeats. They’ve performed this novel synthesis six times, but this Saturday’s show should feel extra exalted for its setting before the Pebble Beach church’s skyward-stretching window opening onto a pine forest. And Coffey should feel at home there on the tuned-up 7-foot Steinway – she’s the music director at Church in the Forest.
She matched the mood and tone of Chopin’s preludes, nocturnes, waltzes and etudes with a cycle of Yeats’ poems that trace the arc of young love, dangerous love, mature love, love in old age.
“The piano supports the narrative line of the poetry,” Coffey says.
For instance, Thomas will recite the first stanza of “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” in which a young man hikes into the woods and catches a fish in a stream as “moth-like stars were flickering out.”
Coffey will then interject with Chopin’s “Prelude No. 9 in E Major,” which she describes as having a “heavy-footed masculine tread.” Thomas will finish the remaining stanzas in which the fish magically turns into a “glimmering girl” who calls his name and runs away, then Coffey will conclude with Chopin’s fleeting “Prelude No. 10 in C Sharp minor.”
They alternate between music and verse.
It will begin with Yeats’ “Brown Penny,” which Coffey describes as a paean to young love, insecure and timid: “O love is the crooked thing,/ There is nobody wise enough/ To find out all that is in it.”
2:30-4:30pm Sat. Church in the Forest, 3152 Forest Lake Road, Pebble Beach. $15. 626-1410.
Ensemble Monterey Chamber Orchestra at Carmel Mission
Ensemble Monterey, joined by vocal ensemble Cantiamo!, gave themselves an expanse of a couple thousand years of choral music to draw from, and has constructed a magnificent music lineup.
They open with Claudio Monteverdi’s “Domine Ad Adjuvandum Me” from 1610, a literal take on the program’s title, Fanfare, with fresh, crisp horn flitting around full-bodied blasts of sacred choral singing. It’s short and sweet, and prepares the ears for virtuoso gothic organ on Eugene Gigout’s romantic “Grand Choeur Dialogue,” which is mighty enough to startle the senses.
Innovative (and living) composer Paul Basler’s “Alleluia” – the first of a five-movement work from his Songs of Faith – fuses the music of Kenya with 20th century classical music in a piece in which sparkling music dances alongside exuberant vocals like dolphins chasing a ship in the Indian Ocean.
Charles-Marie Widor’s “Toccata” is a propulsive organ piece that sounds like something Radiohead would do if they existed in the late 1800s, with satisfying key changes, a galloping tempo, basslines as low as earthquakes, and flurries of notes swirling around the same motif.
That’s just the start of a program stuffed with music by renowned composers like Henry Purcell, Giovanni Croce, Aaron Copland and others.
You’ll leave Ensemble Monterey’s season finale walking taller, proud to be part of this thing called humanity.
8pm Sat. Carmel Mission Basilica, 3080 Rio Road, Carmel. $20-$35. 333-1283, 656-9507, www.EnsembleMonterey.org. (encore: 7pm Sun at Peace United Church of Christ in Santa Cruz).
Hartnell Community Choir at Church of the Wayfarer
Hartnell Community Choir, once affiliated with the school but now an independent ensemble, performs locally at churches but has in the past sung in revered places like Avery Fisher Hall and Carnegie Hall. On Sunday, they’re augmented by the musicians of Monterey Strings and various soloists at Carmel’s Church of the Wayfarer.
“The church has really great acoustics,” says choir soprano Mary Pommerich. “It’s beautiful, has nice ambiance and a sacred feel to it.”
Their spring concert, put together by conductor Robin McKee Williams, begins with two pieces by Johannes Brahms. “Es tont ein voller Harfenklang” has an unwieldy but fitting name (“The full sound of harps rings out”), and is gentle as a lullaby, with the French horn playing plaintively, the harp strumming rhythmically and the choir creating lift as if they were ascending a stairway to heaven.
It’s a prelude to the next Brahms piece, the obscure but sweeping “Gesang de Parzen,” an allegorical battle between heaven and earth. Next comes Gregorio Allegri’s “Miserere,” a haunting a cappella piece designed to inspire more reverence (and a dash of fear) than mirth.
They end with Francis Poulenc’s Stabat Mater, his 1950 12-movement piece that cycles through light and dark shades of the life lead by his deceased friend Christian Berard. This is on the heavier side of among the weekend’s concerts, tempered by a beautiful sonic palette and its daylight end time to ward off any remaining melancholy.