FUUSN Musicians Concert, Take 2: your intrepid musicians will again plan to take the stage on Sunday February 19, 1:00 p.m., in the Sanctuary. Please come out and support these singers and players who have given so much of their time and talent to our worship services. You’ll hear beautiful chamber music played by Lois Shapiro, Mindy Scharlin, the FUUSN Flute Choir, and Paul Antonucci. And you’ll hear our rockin’ FUUSN Band play a wide variety of tunes, from Irish fiddle music to U2. And it’s free (donations to the Germany music tour will be gratefully received)! Hope to see you there!
Other upcoming events: Music Sunday, March 19: When Beauty and Strength Are United. The choir and an orchestra of 20 players will accompany the amazing Lois Shapiro in Beethoven’s tour-de-force Opus 80, the Choral-Fantasy in C minor. The Sanctuary Choir will also sing works of Schütz, Uusberg, and Bach; CreationDance will perform; and we’ll round it all out with a rousing closing number.
“The Choral Fantasy is a combination of free-wheeling fantasy for solo piano, a perky set of variations on a song (Beethoven’s own “Gegenliebe” – Mutual Love, 1795), and a piano concerto. It is closely related to the “Emperor” Concerto in its combination of heroic grandeur and expansive lyricism, but unique to the Fantasy amid the composer’s music for piano and orchestra is its enthusiastic desire to excite the senses: this is show-off music, a virtuoso lark. Perhaps the most arresting feature of Beethoven’s Op. 80, aside from its fanciful construction, which in its free-variations style suggests Beethoven’s legendary skills at keyboard improvisation, is its foreshadowing of the Ninth Symphony’s “Ode to Joy” theme, whose entry here is unmistakable. Beethoven himself described the choral finale of the Ninth, in a letter written in 1824, as ‘a setting of the words of Schiller’s immortal ‘Lied an die Freude’ in the same manner as my pianoforte fantasia, but on a far grander scale.’” (Herbert Glass) -Anne Watson Born