MUSINGS

Your friends and fellow FUUSNites are deep into rehearsals for the Annual FUUSN Musicians concert, and I hope you’ve saved the date: Sunday February 10, 3pm in the FUUSN Sanctuary. The concert, a benefit for our UU Urban Ministry (www.uuum.org), is free and open to the public, and there will be an opportunity to make donations to the UUUM. Rev. Mary Margaret Earl will speak briefly during the concert and you can speak with her and several UUUM staff members during Cookies at Intermission or at the post-concert reception in the Parish Hall.

We’re all excited about the lineup this year: • Paul Antonucci and Debra Minard will open the concert playing the first movement of Beethoven’s G minor sonata for piano and cello. In 1796, on tour in Berlin, Beethoven met the two Duport brothers, both virtuosic cellists; of the younger, Voltaire said, “Sir, you will make me believe in miracles, for I see that you can turn an ox into a nightingale.” The composer’s two early sonatas, Op. 5, were written for the brothers.

• Mindy Scharlin, with Lois, will play the “Meditation” from Jules Massenet’s opera Thaïs. The opera concerns a monk who sets out to convert a courtesan to Christianity; of course he falls in love with her and of course she dies. Between acts 2 and 3 is the famous “Meditation,” representing Thaïs’s spiritual awakening.

• Lois Shapiro will be playing some of Schubert’s Moments Musicaux, composed between 1823-1827. They were published in July 1828, a few months before the composer’s death. Donal Henahan wrote in a 1988 NY Times review: “Each is a jewel containing more real music than the four-movement sonatas of many a master, composed in Schubert’s most deceptively simple, songful style.”

• Our FUUSN Band will cap off the concert with a set featuring original tunes (you don’t want to miss “Chicken Plucking Blues”), a fiddle/mando/banjo medley, and music of Sufjan Stevens, Sting, Mahalia Jackson, The Nields, and more.

Do plan on supporting the UU Urban Ministry and your FUUSN musicians – see you on February 10! –-Anne Watson Born