The Malaspina Choir will combine music, Christian mass, the Islamic call to prayer and poetry to present a Remembrance Day concert focused on peace.
This coming weekend, the choir will perform the Armed Man: A Mass For Peace, which was composed by Karl Jenkins and first performed in 2000. Fiona Blackburn, director of Malaspina Choir, said it is a concert she has wanted to put on for many years.
“We went all the way through it [at rehearsal] and the singers, I think they understood that all this work that they have been putting into the piece is really coming to fruition and they are really telling the story of – we’ve got war and what are we going to do about it,” she said.
Before getting into the main work, the choir will perform Mozart’s Te Deum and do a sing-along with Amazing Grace.
“I always like to do a little bit of audience participation … I just find that it changes the energy in the room – since people who come to hear singers very often are singers themselves and even if they aren’t, they love to sing along,” Blackburn said.
The Armed Man begins with the singers marching and performing a 500-year-old French melody ‘L’homme armé’ (The Armed Man), followed by the Islamic call to prayer, then a piece called Charge, which Blackburn said is “just mind-blowing.”
“It’s so loud and the singers actually create the battle with their voices and all of the players, there are 11 professional players.”
Blackburn said she hopes the concert instills a sense of remembrance and hope in the audience.
“It really has a wonderful storyline of impending war and then this massive piece in the middle, then the silence and The Last Post and then towards the end of the piece it’s gentler and there is a yearning for peace and a feeling of contemplation but certainly a call for the end of war,” she said.
The concert will be at St. Andrew’s United Church on Sunday, Nov. 10, at 3 p.m. Tickets are $30 for adults, $13.50 for youths and free for children under 12. Visit http://porttheatre.com.
tyler.hay@nanaimobulletin.com
