The Bradley Community Chorus and Symphony Orchestra will present Mass in C, K 262, by W. A. Mozart, and Dona Nobis Pacem by Ralph Vaughan Williams on Sunday, November 22, at 3 p.m. in the Dingeldine Music Center, located at 1417 W. Barker Avenue.
Soloists will be Kerry Walters, soprano, of the Bradley Department of Music, and Kevin Keys, baritone, of Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music. Timothy Semanik, director of the Bradley Symphony Orchestra, will conduct the Vaughan Williams work, and John Jost, professor of music and director of choral activities at Bradley, will conduct the Mozart Mass.
Admission is $10 for adults and free for students. Tickets may be purchased at the door or by calling 309-677-2650.
Mozart’s Mass K. 626 is a remarkable work, written when the composer was only 19 but showing a complete mastery of vocal and orchestral forces as well as the technique of writing counterpoint in the style of older composers. The work is filled with melodic appeal and even includes hints of comic opera in the more joyful sections.
Vaughan Williams wrote the powerful cantata Dona Nobis Pacem (“Grant us peace”) in 1936 as a response to the horrors of World War I and the looming threats of another war. The text is drawn mainly from poems of Walt Whitman written as reflections on the carnage he witnessed as a medic in the American Civil War.
