After Coventry Choir's Seattle tour, I went on my sabbatical. Tim Howard was conducting the Foothill Master Chorale at the time, and we determined that it would be an interesting project to combine Canterbury Choir with FMC for this spring concert.
Concerts on Bainbridge Island and in Seattle, morning service in Seattle, and an Evensong on Mercer Island.
It was a wild idea and huge project to produce Amahl at All Saints. There was an amazing young boy soprano in the children's choir program at the time, Theo Lebow, and that fact rather became the clincher in the decision to move forward. Of course, this was not the simple production of my youth, using piano accompaniment only, played by the director. We had an actual director, a choreographer, lavish set and costumes, an instrumental ensemble. And the place was packed to the rafters for both performances. Theo now has an active opera career, and it is fun to remind him from whence he came. And we did use most of the historic 1969 props, most notably the revered crutch. It was a fantastic project for Canterbury and a big hit.
This concert was huge in scale. The Celestial Country by Charles Ives is a wonderfully wild piece for chorus, soloists and orchestra, that I very much enjoyed conducting for my peers in the A.G.O. Then, two organ concertos. Gary Bachlund's premiere concerto has a big organ part which I played, plus a harpsichord part that Tim Howard played, as conductor. I had premiered Craig Phillips' Concertino a few years prior, at St. Matthew's, Pacific Palisades, as part of an Association of Anglican Musicians conference. A wonderful, richly-varied evening of music at All Saints.
We had done a few Christmas Coffeehouses as fund-raisers for our Coventry Choir tours, beginning in 1992. My vision for those was quite simple: use some choral arrangements of mostly-secular carols, have the choir stand up front and sing them, intersperse with a few solos, entertain the congregation with something different than liturgical Advent music and earn some choir scholarship funds. Sweet. Paul Dupree brought a whole new genre to our life with Home for the Holidays. The whole process, from the very beginning, was so engaging to the members of Coventry Choir, as they each chose a character they would like to be. Paul brilliantly wove those characters into a vibrant, fully staged/choreographed, entertaining, moving and altogether joyful extravaganza. I will never forget it and still enjoy watching the recording. Many happy memories ... and a big, fulfilling stretch for all of us.
It wasn't long after his arrival as rector that Ed Bacon wanted to add services. And that never stopped during his tenure. In October 1996, we offered our first in a series of evensongs. Prior to that time, we would have one evensong each year, usually sung by a quartet on the 4th Sunday of Advent. The almost-monthly evensongs that began with this event, deeply enriched our liturgical life over the years. They offered a different type of repertoire for the choirs to work on and an evening service, contemplative in nature, as a complement to our morning eucharists.
