A pre-concert talk on Benjamin Britten and Walt Whitman will launch the April 28 Masterworks concert, which features works by Britten and by Ralph Vaughan Williams using Whitman’s poetry.
The Bethel College Oratorio Chorus and Orchestra will perform Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb and Vaughan Williams’ Dona Nobis Pacem as the featured works, April 28 at 4 p.m. in Memorial Hall.
A pre-concert program will start at 3:15 p.m., with Hilary Donaldson, Toronto, Ontario, a Britten scholar and current president of The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada, via Zoom, on the Britten piece, and Brad Born, Bethel professor of English, on Whitman.
Born will “focus on the Walt Whitman poems that comprise much of the text in Dona Nobis Pacem. Both Vaughan Williams and Whitman had intimate, direct, personal contact with war” (World War I and the Civil War, respectively).
The concert features an orchestra, made up of student instrumentalists, faculty, alumni and friends, and a mass choir comprising all Bethel vocal groups as well as current faculty and staff, alumni and community members. Dr. Henry S. Waters, director of vocal music at Bethel, conducts.
Soloists are Dr. Soyoun Chun, soprano; Georgeanne Yehling, soprano; Emily Son, alto; Ron Garber, tenor; and Christopher Kliewer, bass. In addition, Christopher Shaw is the featured organ soloist.
Chun is the instructor of vocal music at Bethel and has appeared numerous times as a soprano soloist for Masterworks concerts since she began teaching at the college in 2006.
Yehling is a voice instructor at Friends University, the soprano section leader at Grace Presbyterian Church in Wichita, and has performed in numerous opera and music theater roles in Wichita since 2015.
Son teaches music in the Andover school district and is known for directing music theater for children.
Garber retired from 40 years as a music educator in 2012 and is a well-known Newton musician who directed the Kansas Mennonite Men’s Chorus for nine years and the Newton Chorale for 10 years.
Kliewer, director of operations and risk management for TESSERE in Wichita, performs widely as a soloist with choral groups and in churches in the south-central Kansas region, including for the 2023 Masterworks performance of the Beethoven Choral Fantasy.
Shaw teaches choral music at Goddard High School and is the organist for Plymouth Congregational Church in Wichita.
Bethel is a four-year liberal arts college founded in 1887 and is the oldest Mennonite college in North America. Bethel ranks at #23 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of “Best Regional Colleges Midwest” for 2023-24. Bethel was the first Kansas college or university to be named a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Center, in 2021. For more information, see http://www.bethelks.edu
