Sounds of Stow proudly presents our 45th season!

2023 – 2024

We continue to celebrate our commitment to exploring and performing great works from all periods and styles.

A Celtic Celebration!

June 2, 2024,  4pm, First Parish Church of Stow & Acton

Our season ends with a musical trip to the British Isles, A Celtic Celebration!
Join us on the eve of summer as we present tales of love and laughter with
special musical guests – Karen Burciaga: fiddle, & Matthew Wright: guitar & bouzouki.  Both are members of Ulster Landing, a Boston-based band of fiddle, harp, bouzouki, and uilleann (Irish) pipes, specializing in folk music of ​Ireland, Scotland, Brittany, and Cornwall.

Karen Burciaga (fiddle) enjoys bridging the worlds of classical and folk music. A lifelong love of Celtic music led her into the world of fiddling and folk traditions during college. She enjoys playing (and dancing!) Scottish, Irish, English, and contra styles, with occasional forays into Cornish and Breton territory. She founded Ulster Landing and has also fiddled for southern Italian folk band Newpoli and English Country Dance bands in Greater Boston. This winter she appeared in Boston’s Midwinter Revels on vielle and rebec. Karen holds an MM from the Longy School of Music and a BM from Vanderbilt University. She is a founding member of Boston’s folk/early music ensemble Seven Times Salt and has performed on violin and viola da gamba across New England and Texas with groups including The King’s Noyse, Folger Consort, Arcadia Players, and others. Each spring, she attends the New England Folk Festival where she has been spotted attempting Balkan dance or trying out the nyckelharpa.
 
Matthew Wright (guitar, mandolin) spent the years 1987-2000 impersonating a classical guitarist while playing bass guitar in an original rock band in the state of Maryland. He attended the Peabody Conservatory as an undergraduate and studied classical guitar. Upon moving to Boston in 2000, he took up the lute seriously and studied at The Longy School of Music, earning a Master of Music degree. He is an active performer and arranger of music ranging from Renaissance to rock. Matthew founded and plays lute and bandora for folk/early music group Seven Times Salt. He enjoys teaching guitar, ukulele, and piano at Brimmer & May, Belmont Hill, and Mary E. Burbank Schools, and he is the tenor section leader at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Beverly Farms, MA. A lifelong fan of English folk rock, Matt joined Ulster Landing in 2015 when they opened for Steeleye Span.
 

Mighty Mozart!

April 7, 2024, 2:00 pm Littleton High School

Join the Sounds of Stow Chorus and Orchestra as we celebrate our 45th season with our “Mighty Mozart!” program featuring two of his monumental works: the “Mass in C-minor” and the “Piano Concerto No. 20 in D-minor”. The chorus and orchestra will be joined by fantastic piano and vocal soloists to help us bring this beautiful music to life. Vocal soloists include sopranos Logan Trotter and Vanessa Moya, tenor Ethan Bremner, and baritone Jason Jordan.

Mozart’s “Mass in C-minor”, composed between 1782 and 1783, is considered one of his greatest works and a testament to his genius. It is divided into five sections, each meticulously crafted to evoke a range of emotions, from solemnity to exuberance.

Piano soloist Sonya Ovrutsky Fensome will grace our stage once again for the equally dramatic “Piano Concerto No. 20 in D-minor”. Composed in 1785, this profound and emotionally charged work was an immediate success and continues to captivate audiences centuries after its creation.

 
 
image of Conductor Bruce Hangen

Christmas Magic

December 9, 2023, Groton Hill Music Center

Join us for a holiday pops concert with the Vista Philharmonic Orchestra, a memorable program of sacred and secular Christmas music under the direction of Maestro Bruce Hangen.

Two performances – 2:00 pm & 7:30 pm.

For more info & tickets, visit Groton HIll

yellow bird photo

Beauty in Birdsong

November 19, 2023, 2:00 pm at Littleton High School

Under the direction of Barbara Jones, Sounds of Stow will perform Christopher Tin’s important new work, “The Lost Birds”.  In Tin’s preface, he speaks of the work being a “celebration of their beauty—as symbols of hope, peace, and renewal…but it is {also} a memorial for their loss….To pay proper tribute to these birds, I adopted a distinctly 19th-century musical vocabulary: one based on the tunefulness of folk songs with a string orchestra that is both soaring and melancholy.”

Visit Christopher Tin’s website to read more about this gorgeous work, and to hear some of the haunting melodies.  If you have enjoyed the sonic world created by Eric Whitacre or Ola Gjeilo (“Sunrise Mass”), you will relish the opportunity to enter into those special spaces. The music is immediately appealing to everyone who pauses to listen.  In its review of the recently released CD of the work, the Metropolitan Opera’s magazine Opera News noted that the work “laments the steady disappearance of birds from the skies with music that goes straight to the tear ducts.”  And one’s heart.

Tin selects texts by four 19thcentury female poets (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickenson, Christina Rosetti, Sara Teasdale) that consider the place of these magnificent creatures in our natural world, and observe the transformation they saw as the world moved from a pastoral society to an industrial one.

The first half of the concert strikes a very different tone as we visit  various birds as depicted in the musical canon, starting with Vivaldi’s “The Goldfinch” Concerto for Flute in D; Saint-Saens’ familiar “The Swan” arranged for harp and cello; Margaret Lowe’s “Dawn Carol” for multiple flutes; and R.V. Williams’ “The Lark Ascending.”