THIBODAUX – The Nicholls State University Concert Choir and Chamber Singers will present a program of poetry, fairies, flowers and rhymes at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 30, in Talbot Theater on campus. The event is free and open to the public.
Dr. Kenneth S. Klaus, professor of music and director of choral activities, will conduct the performance, with staff accompanist Casey Haynes on the piano.
The Concert Choir will present music composed on texts by such poets as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Herrick, Robert Burns, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Butler Yeats, Lord Byron and William Shakespeare. Composers include Benjamin Britten, John Rutter, James Mulholland, Robert Baksa, Jackson Berkey, Blake R. Henson, Robert Young and Kenneth Blanchard Klaus – father of Dr. Klaus.
The Chamber Singers portion of the program will be a bit lighter, featuring nursery rhymes, limericks and songs about fairies and flowers, including Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” and “Fair Daffodils” by British composer C. Hubert H. Parry. Nursery rhymes include such favorites as “Humpty Dumpty,” “Little Bo-Peep” and “Old King Cole.” Limericks will be family-appropriate. Composers for the Chamber Singers’ selections include Matyas Seiber, Benjamin Britten, Ernst Krenek, Eric Whitacre, and Jackson Berkey, among others.
Throughout the past year, members of the Nicholls Concert Choir have performed with the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Choir and Chorale Acadienne in Lafayette, with the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra; at Carnegie Hall in New York City with choirs from around the country; and with the New England Symphonic Ensemble.
At Walt Disney World, the Chamber Singers performed their own concert and appeared with other choral ensembles and the Walt Disney Symphony Orchestra in the annual Candlelight Christmas Procession and Concert at Epcot Center. The Concert Choir has been invited by the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra to return to Lafayette on October 23, 2010, for a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
