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Press Releases
| Chamber Chorale Welcomes Composer to Minot |
| 2/12/2010 |
The Minot Chamber Chorale will spend “An Evening with Z. Randall Stroope,” as it welcomes the noted composer and conductor to its winter concert on Saturday, February 27 at 7:00 p.m. at Ann Nicole Nelson Hall at Minot State University.
Stroope will conduct a mass choir performing some of his own compositions at the concert. The choir will include members from the Minot Chamber Chorale and its guests, the Minot State University Concert Choir, the Williston Community Concert Chorale, the Williston State College Concert Choir, and the Western Plains Children’s Chorus.
Each of the choral groups will also perform individually. There is no admission charge for the concert, but a free-will offering will be taken.
Z. Randall Stroope is one of the most active choral conductors and composers working in the United States today, with recent conducting engagements at the American School in Singapore, Canterbury Cathedral, England, Salzburger Dom in Salzburg, Washington National Cathedral, Vancouver Symphony, Lincoln Center, and Carnegie Hall. His compositions sell over 200,000 copies a year, and are performed regularly by esteemed ensembles throughout the world. Stroope has personally conducted/recorded 13 professional compact discs, and recordings of his music are heard frequently on radio and television broadcasts across the United States. Chamber Chorale member Todd Mathistad was instrumental in arranging to bring Stroope to Minot for the concert and a singer’s clinic with the choral groups. According to Mathistad, “I was a fan of Randall Stroope after singing his compositions “Caritas et Amor” and “Lux Aeterna” in the Minot Chamber Chorale. But I was especially moved by Randall’s choral interpretation of a poem by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) called “I Am Not Yours”.
The mass choir will perform “I Am Not Yours,” which portrays the intimacy and longing of a life that is searching for an elusive completeness and total connection to another being. The concert includes several other Stroope compositions, such as “The Pasture,” which is his musical setting of a well-known Robert Frost poem, and “Homeland,” which is his arrangement of the patriotic British song set to “Jupiter’s Theme” from Gustav Holst’s “The Planets.”
Brass, percussion, and organ will accompany the mass choir’s performance of the third movement of Stroope’s “Hodie.” The Children’s Chorus will also be featured in this number, which interpolates the German hymn “Wachet auf,” or “Sleepers awake!”
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