The Chamber Singers, City College’s premier student chorus, will perform a selection of English Choral music on Saturday at the Fé Bland Forum.
The concert will feature works by English composers including selections by Benjamin Britten, William Byrd, C.V. Stanford, Louis Halsey, Gustav Hoist, John Rutter and others. The 20-member choir is evenly divided between male and female voices, and will be accompanied by keyboardist Josephine Brummel and pianist George Shearing.
“The concert is a selection of English Choral Music spanning from the Renaissance to the present time,” said Nathan Kreitzer, music department chair. Chronologically, Rutter’s “Birthday Madrigals” are the most modern, but Britten’s “Hymn to St. Cecilia” will sound the most contemporary. The five-century voyage includes “a surprise in the Jazz idiom,” said Kreitzer.
Alyssa Goldstein and Kelli Martony are the featured soloists. Both are enrolled in the Applied Music class, a select group of 10 music majors who get additional practice and private instruction.
“The public should expect beautiful, flowing, classical music,” said Martony of the concert in the intimate and muted Fé Bland Forum. “It’s very melodic.”
A Santa Barbara native, Martony cannot remember when she did not enjoy singing. She has performed in many high school productions and at the Lobero Theater. She aspires to sing professionally. “Thy hand, Belinda” is her solo piece.
“My dream is to be an opera singer,” she said. “That’s why I go to school every hour of every day. I would love to sing in Carnegie Hall.”
Martony may get a chance to sing on a world-renowned stage, but on the other side of the globe. She said she was figuring out how to raise the funds to travel with the City College choir to Australia next year, when a concert is planned at the Sydney Opera House on July 4.
Fresh from her performance as a geisha in “Madama Butterfly” in the Opera Santa Barbara production, Goldstein looks forward to her duet with Martony. They will sing Purcell’s “Sound of Trumpets.”
“It’s nice to be singing, but I think sometimes we are given too much credit,” she said about the focus on the singers instead of the musicians. “It should be more about the harmonies.” Her solo will be “If Music be the Lord of Love.”
Goldstein has not yet decided between a teaching and singing career.
“I don’t think grade-school kids get a good-enough music education,” she said, hinting at a possible profession.
She recognizes the difficulties getting her peers to consider her musical choices seriously. “They try to argue with you that the music they listen to is so much better,” she said.
“I get them in my car and try to get them to listen to operas, to arias, to Berlioz,” Goldstein said.
No cars are needed for this concert, though. It will be presented at the Fé Bland Forum at 7 p.m. on Nov. 15. General admission is $10.