Carols of Death and Other Halloween Melodies Soon to Haunt Port Jervis
Port Jervis Consort will perform spooky classical and popular music at their second Chamber Music Cafe, “Spooks and Monsters,” on Sunday, October 29, 6 p.m. at Marsh Hall.
“Carols of Death” and other eerie songs will have their moment in Port Jervis two months before the season for cheery songs.
“Halloween catches the imagination,” said Jim Blanton, founder of Port Jervis Consort, for whom he has prepared an eclectic program that includes both spooky classical and popular music.
“‘Carols of Death’ is sung by unaccompanied singers. They’re difficult pieces, meditations on death as frightening and challenging but soothing. The carols deal with death‘s complexities,” he said. “The lights will be turned way down, and performers will use battery-powered lights to see their music.”
For a different kind of ghoulish drama, pieces from “Dracula” and “ The Exorcist” will also be included, as well as a Berlioz ghost piece that Blanton calls “death-defyingly” challenging for piano, with vocal background. The pianist will be Bill Goodwin, whom Blanton discovered while strolling down a Port Jervis street. He heard Goodwin’s piano music wafting from a window.
Samuel Barber’s “Anthony O’Daly Is Dead” will take listeners to a funeral full of wailing and moaning for Daly, who fought for worker’s rights during a peasant uprising in the early 1800’s. When he was accused of murder and hanged, Blanton said, the “public outpouring of grief , expressed in a keening, primitive sound,” became the foundation of this piece.
Mendelssohn, Vaughan Williams’ “Lover’s Ghost” and the “Monster Mash” will also be performed.
“Dancing will be encouraged,” said Blanton.
Among those singing Schumann’s “Carols of Death” and other unearthly tunes will be soprano Barbara Norris, of Dingmans Ferry. She has been performing as a singer since childhood, guided by her mother, who had a 15-minute singing radio show in Burlington, Vermont when she was a kid and then sang with a swing band at Dartmouth sorority and fraternity parties in the 1930’s.
“She passed the dream on to me,” said Norris
Norris began with talent shows when she was nine, singing folk songs, and then continued to seek places to sing as she moved with her family from Orange County, New York, to Florida, North Carolina and then to Pennsylvania. She credits Ron De Fesi, in Middletown, with firing up an interest in opera, for which she went back to school at SUNY Purchase for a BFA in her thirties.
Now she looks forward to singing the “otherworldly” Schuman “Carols of Death,” with “emotion structured into harmonies that are quite profound,” and Berlioz with his dancing phantoms asking, “Why are you afraid of us? We were just like you?” Norris said. “Jim Blanton selected a repertoire that’s new, different and challenging, but also haunting.”
Meanwhile, Norris is working on starting a Gilbert and Sullivan organization, finding their work to be a “good way to introduce kids to classical music because it’s funny.”
For Port Jervis Consort cellist Jane Lawson, music was the only activity where she could sit still and focus when she was in elementary school.
“I was mesmerized in music class,” she said. “Music has neurological effects.”
She began playing piano when she was seven, and then her mother gave her a half size cello when she was nine. She went to Europe with her high school choir.
“The choral pieces are spooky,” she said of the upcoming Consort program.
Her cello is spooky too. It was made in 1810 by a luthier who was hung that year for stealing a horse, she said.
“Cello bows are made with horse hair,” Lawson said. “My cello is believed to be the last he made.”
Port Jervis Consort will present their second Chamber Music Cafe, “Spooks and Monsters,” on Sunday, October 29, at 6 p.m. at Marsh Hall, 60 Sussex St. in Port Jervis.
Refreshments will be served and admission is FREE. For information: 845-858-9895 or portjervisarts@gmail.com
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