Gerhard Krapf (1924-2008) died in July of this past year. He was born in Messenheim, Germany and survived four military conscriptions to emigrate to the United States and finally to Canada, all the while writing book after book of extremely useful church music, all of it in the Germanic, spare, rhythmic, Lutheran vein.

David Conte (b. 1955) is a good friend and colleague of both Matthew and me who currently teaches composition and conducts the Choir at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He has most recently set an excerpt from one of Barack Obama’s speeches, which will be premiered as part of the Inaugural festivities this week. His setting of some scribblings off of a bookmark from the library of the 14th Spanish Carmelite nun, St. Theresa of Avila, word paints the sense of unchanging peacefulness. While there is only one musical idea here, that of open-spaced slow-moving soft colors, it’s a good one…

‘Down East,’ a song by Charles Ives, the turn-of-the-20th-century American iconoclast, is a miniature masterpiece. It is a musical depiction of that faint, half-remembered wisp of delight many of us have experienced growing up in smaller towns, or in smaller churches, or on farms:

…hearing a hymn from ‘round the corner…
…the humming from behind the clothes line….
…the warm, earnest moan of a Sunday School Class Chorus…
…the whistling…
…the solidly familiar…

It takes a special sort of singer to pull this one off – someone who can give substance to the delicacy… and so:

Thankfully, Natalie Arduino is in town – to sing a concert called “An Evening of 19th century French Opera” for the St. Cecilia Series at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church on Tuesday night – and she agreed to take on the task and to bring this remarkable piece to us at both services this morning.

Because of the extreme fragility and quietly vivid nature of opening of the song, we’re going to wait until the ushers finish the collection before we start…

Having Natalie here reminds me how very much I am looking forward to our presentation of the marvelous one-act opera, Savitri [Music of Gustav Holst; words from The Mahābhārata, one of the two major Sanskrit epics of Ancient India…], which will feature Natalie singing the title role. This heart-warming and stunning tale of redemption, which Natalie sings with a sort of full-court eternal-feminine press, will be offered on March 14th of this year, at 7:30. Mark your calendars NOW!

-Keith Weber