Bel Canto Chorus will perform its first show under new artistic director » Urban Milwaukee

Fifteen years after he joined the baritone section Bel canto choir, Jonathan Laabs will take the podium as the organization’s artistic director on Sunday, October 20th. Laabs is successful Richard Hynsonwho retired as music director earlier this year after leading Bel Canto for 36 years.

While teaching in the greater Milwaukee area, Laabs was a choir member and section leader for Bel Canto. Most recently, he was Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department at Martin Luther College in New Ulm, Minnesota. He also serves as artistic director and conductor of Canticum Novum, a chamber choir based in the Midwest.

Laabs’ goal is to “create programs that remain in touch with the traditions of Bel Canto while entering a new era.” To underscore the 93-year-old choir’s mission to “build communities by connecting people through music Connects,” Laabs chose the theme “Voices United” for the 2024-25 Bel Canto season. The inaugural Voices of the Earth concert features five compositions that celebrate our shared experience as inhabitants of our planet.

The program includes several major works. In the beginning, written in 1947 by Aaron Copland (1900–1990) is based on a text from Genesis 1:1–2:7, the biblical account of the seven days of creation. Sung without accompaniment by choir and soprano solo Rebecca WhitneyThe polytonal work switches seamlessly between keys. Before a performance in 1980, Copland admonished Brown University singing students: “The creation was quite a stunt, so make it great.” As Laabs notes, the piece is “not for the faint of heart.”

The second pillar of the concert on October 20th is Midwinter Songs, written in 1980 by an extremely popular and prolific American composer Morten Lauridsen (born 1943). The songs are musical settings of five poems by an English writer Robert Graves (1895-1985), who use allusions to winter to express Graves’ romantic feelings towards his lover and his second wife. The composer achieves a “lush, beautiful, calm sound with a lot of innovation and experimentation,” said Laabs.

“Lauridsen’s music is typically characterized by rapturous contemplation,” he wrote Steve Schwartz for Classical Net. However, “Midwinter Songs” conveys something more disturbed and agitated…. [T]His poems are about love, sex and death.”

For American choral composers Jake Runestad (born 1986): “Finding the text is the longest part of my work [composing] Proceedings.” I hope to embody the personality of the Wisconsin-raised conservationist and naturalist John MuirRunestad searched the Sierra Club’s web archive for Muir’s writings and discovered fragments that form the text for Come to the Woods. As the singers proclaim, “Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue,” Muir frolicks along forest paths and climbs a tree to watch a storm. Piano interludes suggest Muir’s ruminations and daydreams. At the end of the day: “Come to the forest,” Muir invites, “because here there is peace.”

The Bel Canto Chorus will perform Voices of the Earth on Sunday, Oct. 20, at St. Sebastian Catholic Church, 5400 W. Washington Blvd., at 3 p.m. Tickets with discounts for students and seniors are available on Bel Canto’s website, which also provides helpful insight into the program.