Collaborative Youth Concerts; 4th Annual Young Men’s Choral Festival; Vocal Quartet Performs at Boston Children’s Museum

The 2010-2011 Season marks the 25th anniversary of Handel and Haydn Society’s educational outreach program, established in 1985. Lowell Mason, best known as the founding father of music education in American public schools, enjoyed a long association as musical editor (and later President) of the Society starting in 1820. Almost 200 years later, Handel and Haydn Society continues to foster Mr. Mason's legacy of providing citizens of all ages with the joys of classical music through a variety of programs. As part of the Handel and Haydn Society’s 25th anniversary celebration of the Karen S. and George D. Levy Educational Outreach Program, Artistic Director Harry Christophers and the Society have increased efforts to offer hands-on learning and performance opportunities for youth (Grades 3-12) in Greater Boston and beyond.

Collaborative Youth Concerts

On February 10 and 11, 2011, the Society will present two Collaborative Youth Concerts as part of its program in which high school choristers rehearse and perform in their own neighborhoods alongside the Handel and Haydn Society Period Instrument Orchestra and Chorus. Choirs from Boston Latin School, Boston Arts Academy, Lawrence High, and Brockton High will team up to present performances in their communities with Society musicians. Concerts will take place on February 10 at 8pm with Boston Latin School and Boston Arts Academy at Boston Latin School, 70 Avenue de Louis Pasteur, Boston, and on February 11 at 11:30am with Brockton and Lawrence High Schools at Lawrence High School, 70-71 North Parish Rd, Lawrence. Students have been working with Society chorusmaster John Finney to learn excerpts from Handel’s Israel in Egypt, a work premiered by the Society in the United States in 1859 and being performed at Symphony Hall on February 18 and 20.

Artistic Director Harry Christophers elaborates: “any educational program has to whet the appetite of its students. A work such as Handel’s Israel in Egypt can do just that, and on so many levels. Whatever your belief, the story is monumentally exciting – it narrates in graphic detail not only the story of the ten plagues that fall on the hapless Egyptians, but also celebrates the miraculous deliverance of the chosen people from Pharaoh’s wrath. As a literary story it is full of interest open to endless discussion. As music it is like a great canvas with the artist Handel painting the words in musical phrases that are so descriptive – frogs, flies, lice, locusts, hailstones culminating in the superb chorus (“The Lord shall reign for ever and ever”) complete with horse and rider thrown into the sea.”

Young Men’s Choral Festival

The Society will present its 4th annual Young Men’ Choral Festival on Saturday, February 19, 2011 culminating in a concert at 5pm at Boston Latin School, 70 Avenue de Louis Pasteur, Boston. In addition to the Handel and Haydn Society’s Young Men’s Chorus (Joseph Stillitano, conductor), the festival will feature Boston Children’s Chorus Male Ensemble (Anthony Trecek-King, conductor), students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Concert Choir and Chamber Chorus, The Boston Conservatory Concert Chorale (William Cutter, conductor, MIT and The Boston Conservatory), Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Men’s Glee Club (John Delorey, conductor), the North Quincy High School Yakootones (directed by William Hunny, student), and students from other local high schools.

During the one-day festival, each choir will be showcased separately in performance. High school students will also have the opportunity to rehearse and then perform with the three collegiate choirs as well as participate in an a cappella workshop by the M.I.T. Logarhythms and have lunch with the collegiate singers. The festival, which draws close to 150 participants annually, has previously been held at Tufts University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Harvard University.

The festival concert will conclude with “Haul Away, Joe” arranged by William Cutter, “If Ye Love Me,” and “Soon-ah Will Be Done” performed by the combined choirs and conducted by William Cutter.

Vocal Quartet performs at Boston Children’s Museum

The Handel and Haydn Society’s Vocal Quartet will present “Voices of the Stage,” a 45-minute performance exploring music as storytelling on Wednesday, February 23, 2011, at 1pm at Boston Children’s Museum, 308 Congress Street, Boston.

The presentation marks Handel and Haydn Society’s debut at the Museum. The performance presents examples of how opera, oratorios, and musical theater each tell a story through music. The program, free with museum admission, spans over 500 years of music and includes work by Gershwin, Gluck, Handel, Larsen, Loesser, Mozart, Puccini, and Rossini among others.

The Vocal Quartet, the cornerstone of the Society’s educational outreach program, is in its 25th season of live performances, visiting 8,000 schoolchildren annually. Members of this year’s quartet include Teresa Wakim, soprano; Emily Marvosh, mezzo; Christian Figueroa, tenor; RaShaun Campbell, bass; and David Robbins, pianist.

Events at a glance

February 10 8pm
Collaborative Youth Concert: Boston Latin School and Boston Arts Academy
Boston Latin School, 70 Avenue de Louis Pasteur, Boston
Free admission

February 11 11:30am
Collaborative Youth Concert: Brockton High School and Lawrence High School
Lawrence High School, Lawrence High School, 70-71 North Parish Rd, Lawrence
Free admission

February 19 5pm
Young Men's Chorus at Men's Choral Festival
Boston Latin School, 70 Avenue de Louis Pasteur, Boston
Free admission

February 23 1pm
Vocal Quartet presents “Voices of the Stage”
Boston Children’s Museum, 308 Congress Street, Boston
Free with museum admission

The Karen S. and George D. Levy Educational Outreach Program

Established in 1985, the Society’s educational outreach program was created with strong roots to the organization’s early leaders. Lowell Mason, best known as the founding father of music education in American public schools, enjoyed a long association with Handel and Haydn as musical editor, and then later served as President of the Society from 1827 until 1832. Mason taught classes at the Bowdoin Street Church and founded the Boston Academy of Music in 1833 to promote music education to the public. When the Society launched its official educational initiative in 1985, it focused on public education with the development of the Vocal Quartet and its free in-school visits that now reach public schools in eight Massachusetts districts; the Collaborative Youth Concerts program soon followed in 1987, where students from different schools and cultural backgrounds come together to perform for their communities alongside Society musicians.

In 1994, the Vocal Apprenticeship Program (VAP) started with the Youth Chorus (ages 11-14) and Soloists at New England Conservatory. Later, VAP reached younger students with the Singers chorus (ages 8-11), and also high school students through its Young Men’s (ages 13-18) and Young Women’s (ages 15-18) Choruses, so that students could grow with the program for several years, increasing their individual sense of accomplishment as they passed through each level. Students enrolled in VAP learn music theory and receive performance opportunities throughout each season. VAP classes take place in the state-of-the-art music division wing of the Boston Latin School, located in one of the most culturally accessible neighborhoods of Boston next to Massachusetts College of Art, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The Handel and Haydn Society is the only professional music organization in Massachusetts serving as a parent to its own children’s choir program and regularly presenting them in conjunction with its professional series at Symphony Hall. VAP is also the only children’s choir program in New England to include individualized scholarships for voice instruction, diction, and other classes for potential music majors in collaboration with New England Conservatory.

ABOUT HANDEL AND HAYDN SOCIETY
The Handel and Haydn Society is a professional chorus and period instrument orchestra that is internationally recognize­d as a leader in the field of Historically Informed Performance, a revelatory style that uses the instruments and techniques of the time in which the music was composed. Founded in Boston in 1815, the Society is the oldest continuously performing arts organization in the United States and has a longstanding commitment to excellence and innovation: it gave the American premieres of Handel’s Messiah (1818), Haydn’s The Creation (1819), Verdi’s Requiem (1878) and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (1879). The Society today, under the leadership of Artistic Director Harry Christophers, is committed to its mission “to perform Baroque and Classical music at the highest levels of artistic excellence and to share that music with as large and diverse an audience as possible.” The Society is widely known through its local subscription concerts, tours, concert broadcasts on National Public Radio, and recordings. The Society’s Lamentations and Praises won a 2002 Grammy Award and two of its CDs, All is Bright and Peace, appeared simultaneously in the top ten on Billboard Magazine’s classical music chart. In September 2010, Handel and Haydn released its first collaboration with Harry Christophers on the CORO label, Mozart’s Mass in C Minor – the first in a series of recordings leading to the Society’s Bicentennial in 2015. The 2010-2011 Season marks the 25th Anniversary of Handel and Haydn’s award-winning Karen S. and George D. Levy Educational Outreach Program that brings music education, vocal training and performance opportunities to more than 10,000 students annually in Greater Boston and beyond.

Handel and Haydn Society is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

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