Children’s Chorus director conducts final concert

After 15 years at the podium, Lise Dunn will step down as director of the Southern Maine Children’s Chorus. Her final spring concert with the children will be held at 7 p.m., Saturday, May 16, 2009, in the Freeport Performing Arts Center. Admission is by donation. Call 780-5555 for more information.

Dunn, a music teacher at Mast Landing School in Freeport, gave a brief history of the chorus. “In the late 1980’s, Dr. Betty Atterbury of the University of Southern Maine School of Music, founded the Southern Maine Children’s Chorus. It was an exciting time for choral singing for children. Work by such leaders as Doreen Rao, Barbara Tagg and Henry Leck, among others, inspired the founding of community choirs for young singers throughout the country. This movement encouraged composers to write music for children’s choirs as they recognized the beauty and expressive qualities of the children’s choir sound. Consequently an explosion of new works became available to children’s choirs. The late Dr. Atterbury, who was forward thinking and passionate about music education, enjoyed directing the choir for several years.”

Dunn took over the chorus in 1994. Over the years, hundreds of children have sung with the various choirs within the chorus. Dunn has had help from assistant directors Renovia Marro, Diana Mosher, and Monica Kantor-Churchill; as well as from accompanist, Katy Stetson.

For their May program the Training Choir, under the direction of Renovia Marro, will begin by performing a varied selection of pieces, including "Sing for Joy" by Handel, “River in Judea” by Linda Marcus and Jack Feldman, and “Beauty of the Rain” by Victoria Ebel-Sabo. Both the Concert Choir and Training Choir will perform music by John Rutter. The Training Choir will sing his lyrical and light-hearted "Magical Kingdom" ("Everyone has their own magical kingdom / High on a hilltop and touching the sky / Some where you go when you wish on a rainbow / Some where you can fly.")

Adult guests from the Choral Art Society will join the Concert Choir to perform excerpts from Rutter’s "Mass of the Children." (They will perform the work in its entirety with the CAS on May 2.) In this work Rutter uses poetry to illuminate the text of the Mass. This work too, is lyrical, and the writing, which includes rich harmonies and lilting rhythms, is well suited to children's voices. The Concert Choir will also sing sections from “Peace Variations On a Theme by Bach,” commissioned in memory of the SMCC founder, Betty Atterbury.

The Concert Choir will perform a set of music which includes a South African freedom song, a wildly polyphonic a cappella song by Zoltan Kodaly, and a lush arrangement of "Over the Rainbow." The concert concludes with Allan Naplan's "An American Anthem," sung by all.