2012-2013 Season: Journeys in Belief

Special Event

The Singing Revolution

Film Screening and Audience Q&A with Director Jim Tusty
Saturday, October 20, 2012, 7:00 pm
Unity of Boulder
2855 Folsom Street, Boulder CO 80304
Private Reception and Discussion with Director Jim Tusty
Friday, 19 October 2012, 7:00 pm

This will be the first-ever Cantabile fund raiser. Cantabile will perform several Estonian songs from The Singing Revolution, which we will then screen. This award-winning film documents how the people of Estonia led a peaceful revolt against Soviet oppression, using a centuries-old tradition of folk music and a quadrennial national song festival as a powerful means of subverting Moscow’s tyranny. It is an inspirational story of how song can be so much more than entertainment.

Jim Tusty, the film’s director will be on hand to answer questions about the film, its history and its power in transcending politics to achieve freedom.

All proceeds will go towards Cantabile’s 2012-13 Season. Buy tickets online now.

Concert Season

Gypsy Living

Sunday, November 4, 2012, 2:00 pm
Estes Park Music Festival
The Stanley Hotel
333 E Wonder View Ave, Estes Park CO

Friday, November 9, 2012, 7:30 pm
First Congregational Church
1128 Pine Street, Boulder CO

This program will feature Brahms’ colorful Zigeunerlieder and Schumann’s lighthearted Zigeunerleben. Brahms wrote his Zigeunerlieder (Gypsy Songs) based on a collection of twenty-five Hungarian tunes which fueled the appeal of all things Gypsy at the time. The descriptive poetry translated from the Hungarian depicts journeys of love lost and regained, of scenes in the life of these wandering peoples. They are definitely the more exotic counterparts to the Liebeslieder Waltzes, first performed by Cantabile in 2010. Schumann’s Zigeunerleben (Gypsy Life) on the other hand depicts a gathering of gypsies around a campfire, with a great sense of curiosity and enchantment.

Cantabile will also perform well-loved works by Lauridsen, Duruflé, Vaughan Williams and Billings, among others, and will feature Stella and Alejandro playing Brahms’ slow movement to his third Sonata, a piece written by Brahms at the time of his Gypsy songs. You will also hear the famous Czardas by Monti in its virtuosic version for violin and piano.

Bach in Brief

Friday, February 8, 2013
First United Methodist Church
Longmont CO

Saturday, February 9, 2013
First Congregational Church
Boulder CO

Throughout his life as a musician, Johann Sebastian Bach composed cantatas for both secular and sacred use. Boulder audiences may have heard Bach’s Cantata 187 in the recent Boulder Bach Festival. During the period 1735-1740, Bach adapted some of the most beautiful material from Cantatas 102 and 187 into the short Mass in G minor, BWV 235. We will perform this work in a collaboration with excellent musicians from the University of Colorado at Boulder College of Music.

Arvo Pärt’s Berlin Mass

Saturday, April 27, 2013, 5:00 pm
Grace Lutheran Church
1001 13th Street, Boulder CO
This performance is for benefactors of the CU Art Museum, and is not open to the public.

Friday, May 17, 2013, 7:30 pm
Grace Lutheran Church
1001 13th Street, Boulder CO

Saturday, May 18, 2013, 7:30 pm
Christ Church
2950 S University Blvd, Denver CO

For Cantabile’s season ending, we will share the mystical music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Following the inspiration gathered from Estonia’s fight for liberation from Soviet oppression with song as their sole weapon, we will recreate Pärt’s Berlin Mass, written in 1990, and revised in 2002. Pärt is Estonia’s foremost composer and one of the most important living composers in the world, and this music follows the traditional form of the Mass while expressing Pärt’s unique musical idiom that transcends analysis. This is truly meditative and uplifting music, written to commemorate the feast of the Holy Spirit, yet it is also music without religious affiliation. The composer describes his compositional technique, which he calls “tintinnabuli” (from the Latin, little bells), thus:

I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements—with one voice, two voices. I build with primitive materials—with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells and that is why I call it tintinnabulation.

As in our previous two concerts of the season “Journeys in Belief”, Cantabile will also sing works from the choir’s 20+ year history, including choral favorites form all over the world heard in recent years.