November 28, 2000

Choral Music for the Advent and

Christmas Seasons Dec. 10

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.―The Middlebury

College Chamber Singers and Early Music Vermont (EMV) will present a

concert of music for the Advent and Christmas seasons at 3 p.m. on

Sunday, Dec. 10, in the College’s Mead Chapel on Hepburn Road

off College Street (Route 125). The concert is free and open to the

public.

The 15-voice Chamber Singers will

sing a cappella music from the Renaissance and 20th century. The

concert will feature Renaissance motets by 15th century English

composers William Byrd, Christian Erbach, and J. P. Sweelinck set to

traditional Advent and Christmas texts; traditional carols from

Spain, France, and Germany; as well as carol arrangements by Alice

Parker, Benjamin Britten, and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Members of Early Music Vermont will

present music written during the past millennium in honor of the

Virgin Mary. The six singers and instrumentalists will perform

chants, and Renaissance and baroque music by Guillaume Dufay, Robert

Cooper, Claudio Monteverdi, Byrd, and Britten. The program also

includes works from 13th-century Spanish manuscripts, 15th-century

English manuscripts, and the 16th-century hymn collection Piae

Canciones, as well as songs originating from Spain, Mexico, and

Appalachia.

Also on the program are baroque works

for organ performed by George Matthew, Jr., carilloneur for

Middlebury College and organist for Middlebury Congregational

Church.

Founded a year ago, the Middlebury

College Chamber Singers perform under the direction of Jeff Rehbach.

Rehbach also conducts the Middlebury Congregational Church Choir and

Middlebury Community Chorus. He recently led the combined Community

and College Choirs as part of Middlebury College’s Continental

Harmony concert―and event held in honor of the College’s

Bicentennial. Last year the Chamber Choir performed full-length fall

and spring concerts, and toured in London, Oxford, and Paris. The

group also performed in a variety of concerts in late spring,

including the College’s Bicentennial opera gala, a program of

Bach chorales and organ preludes, and the College music

department’s chamber soloists concert.

Early Music Vermont also was formed

in the fall of 1999, and brings together singers and players from

throughout the state of Vermont who share a desire to study and

perform music of the past 1,000 years. The group’s founder and

artistic director, Marybeth McCaffrey, studies voice with Ellen

Hargis and Drew Minter, and has performed as a soloist with the

Amherst Early Music Collegium. EMV’s singers are members of the

Vermont Symphony Orchestra Chorus and numerous other choral ensembles

in the area. EMV presented a series of concerts throughout the state

last winter titled “Carols through the Millennium,” and a second

series in the spring, summer, and early fall called “Music of Women

through the Millennium.”

For more information about the Dec.

10 concert, contact Jeff Rehbach, conductor of the Middlebury College

Chamber Singers, at 802-443-5877.

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