The North Island Choral Society celebrates the Festive Season

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Friday, December 2nd, 2016
7:30 PM

The North Island Choral Society celebrates the Festive Season with performances of three famous oratorios in three languages.

This well established Comox Valley community choir focuses their attention on classical choral works from across the centuries. Their two upcoming concerts continue this very successful tradition.

The program for the concerts is about the Christmas Season. In the first half of the program is Camille Saint-Saëns’ sensitive and eternally fresh Oratorio de Noël, op12. The work, commissioned by the Church of the Madeleine, Paris, France, was where the composer was organist.

The first performance was for Christmas 1858. Saint-Saëns was 23. He finished it in eleven days! The work requires five soloists and is sung in Latin. The second half of the program starts with Johann Sebastian Bach’s broad and expansive Christmas Oratorio, MBV248, Part One. This oratorio was composed for performance on six separate occasions over the Christmas period. The opening chorus starts by asking everyone to Shout for joy, exult and rise up, glorify the day. It sets the mood of the oratorio, which is inherently about the optimism of faith. First performed in Leipzig, Germany, it is sung in German.

The program concludes with representative selections from George Frideric Handel’s Messiah, including such beloved pieces as the recitative Comfort Ye My People, the chorus For Unto Us a Child Is Born and ending in the triumphant Hallelujah Chorus. Handel was famed for his Italian operas, which were becoming of limited appeal and mainly to the aristocracy. His writing of Messiah was a stroke of financial and musical genius, appealing to everyone, enhanced by the selection of the right prose from the Bible by Handel’s very wealthy friend, the Reverend Charles Jennens. The first performance was in Dublin, Ireland, and it is sung in English.

Paul Colthorpe, NICS artistic director, supported by the skills of accompanist Elvera Penner, has been rehearsing the choir to even higher standards of excellence.

The choir will be joined by soloists Michelle Johnson, soprano, Carol Anne Parkinson, soprano, Lisa Deith, contralto, David Brown, tenor and Christopher Bellamy, bass and the NICS Orchestra (concert master Corrinne Innes).