GRANVILLE -- Denison University's Concert Choir will open its 110th season with a performance of selected works by British composers at 7:30 p.m., Sunday (Nov. 17) in Swasey Chapel. The Choir will be joined by an orchestra, along with soprano Stephanie Adrian, violist Brett Allen and The Angel Choir of Granville's First Presbyterian Church, directed by Joy Hire. The performance will be conducted by Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts William Osborne and is free and open to the public.

Stephanie Adrian

The program will begin with composer Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Flos Campi," which Osborne describes as "an unusual work from 1925 involving a solo viola, chamber orchestra and wordless chorus" with each of its six selections referring to verses from the biblical Song of Solomon. Following this piece will be a second work from Williams, the 1929 "Benedicite," a setting for choir and solo soprano of liturgical words taken from the Apochrypha. The second half of the concert will consist of composer Andrew Carter's version of the "Benedicite," a very different work commissioned for the 1989 Edinburgh Singing Day. In this piece, a separate youth choir presents "Carter's own language explaining how all sorts of non-biblical animals and people can also praise their Lord," said Osborne.

Vaughan Williams was one of the giants of British music before his death in 1958. Carter has published more than 50 anthems, carol arrangements and large-scale works for chorus and orchestra and was honored in 1977 when he was chosen to write a mass to celebrate the tercentenary of London's St. Paul's Cathedral.

Soprano Adrian holds degrees from the University of Tulsa, Southern Methodist University and Ohio State University. She has had a wide variety of experience with both opera and oratorio and is currently a member of the faculty at Otterbein College.

Allen has served as assistant principal violist of the Columbus Symphony since 1991. He earned an undergraduate degree in music performance from Boston University and later played with the United States Air Force Strolling Strings and did graduate work in viola at the Cleveland Institute of Music. The Oxford University Press has published one of his pieces, "Nativity Scenes, Suite for String Orchestra."

Hire, Denison class of 1974, has developed a significant youth choir program at Granville First Presbyterian Church since 1993. The choir sings regularly, has toured, and has issued two CDs of holiday music. Sunday's concert will mark The Angel Choir's second appearance with Denison's Concert Choir.

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