Island Voices Chamber Choir will fire the imaginations of their fall concert audience, as many of their pieces will evoke powerful images.
But for one song, actual images will take the place of imagination.
As choir director John Hooper explains, “I happened to meet Sasha Kondakov, a street photographer who had recently emigrated to Courtenay from Ukraine. I was fascinated with Kondakov’s photographs from Ukraine – not pictures of war but images of children sliding down a snowy hill, a grandmother carrying groceries, a wheat field.”
Kondakov has agreed to let Island Voices show some of his Ukrainian photographs as they sing “Ukrainian Alleluia.”
For the other pieces, the audience will have to use their imaginations, but in “O Captain! My Captain!” it will not be difficult to picture the doomed captain slowly sliding to the deck at the end of battle. After the concert, audience members will be able to chat with the song’s British composer Jonathan Rippon, who will be flying all the way from the UK to the Comox Valley to hear what will be the Canadian premiere of his work.
“Perseus,” a work of elemental force, will conjure up images of the Greek hero – “an army of one” – as he enters the lair of Medusa. The beautiful “Evening Prayer” uses the words of Swedish poet Karin Boye as she asks for the cares and clamor of the day to be set aside. In an entirely different vein, a jazzy “They’re Red Hot” by 1930s blues songwriter Robert Johnson extols the virtues of a street vendor’s hot tamales.
If you are ready to use your imaginations, Island Voices will be in concert on Saturday, Nov. 25 at 2:30 p.m. at Comox United Church, 250 Beach Drive in Comox, and on Sunday, Nov. 26 at 2:30 p.m. at St. Peter Anglican Church, 228 South Dogwood Street, Campbell River.
Concert-goers can purchase their tickets online at islandvoiceschamberchoir.bc.ca ($25 adults / $10 students) A limited number of paper tickets will also be available – cash only – at Blue Heron Books (Comox), Benjamin Moore House of Color (Courtenay) and The Music Plant (Campbell River).