Knox College Choir Tour 2009

The Knox College Choir presents eight performances in March, including six through the Midwest, for its 2009 concert tour.

The 55-voice choir, conducted by Laura Lane, professor and chair of the music department, and director of choral activities at Knox College, will perform twice in Galesburg, also in Iowa City, Iowa; Edina, Minnesota; Milwaukee and Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin; and Rockford and Techny, Illinois. All the performance are free and open to the public.

The tour program also features sacred and secular choral works, vocal jazz and folk songs from Haiti and Romania.

The largest single work in the concert is Canticum Calamitatis Maritimae by the Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi. The piece was composed in memory of the worst modern maritime disaster -- the sinking of the ferry Estonia in the Baltic Sea in 1994, in which more than 800 people died.

"I was drawn to the piece when I first heard it, and I said to myself, 'I have to know more about it," said John Eisemann, a choir member from Portland, Oregon. "I read all the articles about the Estonia that I could find, and eventually I shared what I learned with the rest of the choir."

"We sing a lot of text, and I think that if we know more about what the text means, what it stands for, we'll have a better context," said Eisemann, a junior music major.

Althought the text of Mäntyjärvi's Canticum Calamitatis Maritimae is in Latin, the piece opens and closes with a wordless solo, performed by choir member Lillian Wirth, a senior music and educational studies major from Northbrook, Illinois.

"It's calming, almost like a lullabye, but you can tell something isn't right," Wirth said of the opening. "It's haunting, but it's also soothing for the people who have been hurt by the tragedy."

Other concert selections include sacred works by Palestrina, Anton Bruckner, Alice Parker, Z. Randall Stroope and Moses Hogan; secular works by Morten Lauridsen, Lennon and McCartney, and Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern.

The Knox College Choir tours annually, with a European tour every three years. In the past ten years, the choir has performed in Barcelona and the Catalan region of Spain, England, Austria and the Czech Republic. Domestic tours have included concerts in Chicago, Minneapolis, Washington, Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans and, in March 2005, Carnegie Hall in New York City.

Knox College Choir 2009 Concert Tour Schedule

March 1, 3 p.m.
Pre-Tour Concert, First Lutheran Church, 364 E. Water St., Galesburg.

March 15, 7 p.m.
First Presbyterian Church, 2701 Rochester Ave., Iowa City, Iowa

March 16, 7:30 p.m.
Edina-Morningside Community Congregational Church, 4201 Morningside Rd., Edina, Minnesota.

March 17, 7:30 p.m.
The Basilica of St. Josaphat, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

March 18, 7 p.m.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Spring Creek Road and Bell School Road, Rockford, Illinois

March 19, 7 p.m.
St. Anne Catholic Church, Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin

March 21, 7:30 p.m.
Divine Word International, Techny, Illinois

March 27, 7:30 p.m.
Home Tour Concert, Kresge Recital Hall, Knox College

Knox College Choir - 2009 Concert Tour Program

Si ch'io vorrei morire, Claudio Monteverdi
Sicut cervus; Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
Locus iste; Anton Bruckner
Hark, I hear the harps eternal; Alice Parker
Cantus gloriosus; Józef Swider
Canticum Calamitatis Maritimae; Jaakko Mäntyjärvi
All My Heart This Night Rejoices; Z. Randall Stroope
Kalinda; Sydney Guillaume
Immortal Bach; arr. Knut Nystedt
Sârba pe scaun; Alexandru Pascanu
Loch Lomond; arr. Jonathan Quick
Ezekiel Saw de Wheel; arr. Moses Hogan

Knox College Chamber Singers:
Gloria, from La Messe de Notre Dame; Guillaume de Machaut
Io mi son giovinetta; Claudio Monteverdi
Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen; Heinrich Isaac
Contre qui; Morten Lauridsen, based on text by Rilke
Blackbird/I Will; Lennon & McCartney, arr. Rathbone
All the Things You Are; Hammerstein & Kern, arr. Swingle

Above, Lillian Wirth, John Eisemann; below, Laura Lane rehearses the Knox College Choir.