April
25, 2003 April
27 Glee Club Concert to Feature Faculty Progeny
| 
David
McFerrin Lemly |
Considering
their parents, they almost couldn't help being musically
gifted. Soprano Mara Bonde '91, daughter of Mount Holyoke
music professor and composer Allen Bonde and his wife, Maria,
and baritone David McFerrin Lemly, son of Mount Holyoke choral
director Catharine Melhorn, Hammond Douglass Professor of Music,
and her husband, English Professor John Lemly, will show off what
the combination of great genes and training can produce when they
serve as soloists in a performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams's
Dona Nobis Pacem set for Sunday, April 27, at 2:30 pm
in Abbey Chapel. Bonde has appeared previously at Mount Holyoke
as a soloist in Mozart's Requiem. This will be
Lemly's first professional solo appearance in the Pioneer
Valley. The event will feature the combined glee clubs of Mount
Holyoke and Harvard University (Jameson Marvin, director; Kevin
Leong, assistant conductor). Melhorn will conduct the Dona
Nobis Pacem, accompanied by the Valley Festival Orchestra,
which is made up of local student and professional players. The
glee clubs will also perform separately works for men's
and women's voices. Included are Franz Schubert's
beloved "Psalm 23" and Vittorio Giannini's "Passionate
Shepherd to His Love," which will feature student oboist
Audrey MacDougall '05.
| 
Mara
Bonde '91 |
"First performed
in 1936, Vaughan Williams's Dona Nobis Pacem most definitely
speaks to our time," says Melhorn. "This forty-minute
cantata for mixed choir, large orchestra, and two soloists provides
powerful music for impassioned texts which describe the carnage
and confusion of war and the world's hope for reconciliation
and peace." Himself a veteran of World War I and an early
advocate for a federated Europe, English composer Vaughan Williams
chose three Walt Whitman Civil War-era poems as the centerpiece
of this work. Among them is the "Dirge for Two Veterans,"
about a father and son killed in the same battle. More hopeful
texts resound in the final movement, while a fragment of the Latin
Mass Dona Nobis Pacem (Give Us Peace) is woven throughout the
work.
| 
A
young David Lemly |
Soloists Bonde and
Lemly will return to native soil for the event. A frequent guest
artist with the Boston Pops, Bonde has performed with the Utah
Opera and the Utah Symphony, Boston's Handel and Haydn Society,
the San Diego Symphony, the National Opera Company (Raleigh),
and the Lake George Opera Festival. A national semifinalist in
the 2002 Metropolitan Opera auditions, Bonde will be in residence
with Glimmerglass Opera this summer. Bonde attended South Hadley
public schools, graduated from Mount Holyoke, and earned a master
of music degree from Boston University. Lemly is currently completing
a master's degree in vocal performance at the Cincinnati
College Conservatory of Music, where he recently appeared as Aeneas
in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. He has also performed the
roles of Claudio in Handel's Agrippina at the Opera Festival
of Lucca in Italy and of Jesus in Bach's St. John Passion,
in a Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra production. This summer, Lemly
will be in residence at Central City Opera in Colorado.
|
Mara Bonde as a second grader |
"I fondly remember
Mara playfully hiding under a piano during a rehearsal for my
faculty children's choir years ago, and, later, as a talented
member of and soloist with Mount Holyoke choral ensembles,"
says Melhorn. "David sang under my baton for five years
in the Mount Holyoke Children's Choir; was a child soloist
with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra; and sang with Jessel
Murray at Amherst High School and with an a cappella group, The
Shadoopmobile, at many Amherst community functions. I not-so-fondly
remember David attending my rehearsal in Chapin Auditorium at
age three, when he set off the handicap-accessible fire alarm,
causing a loss of more than an hour of rehearsal time!"
Tickets for the concert may be reserved by calling x2306 or may
be purchased at the door. Unreserved seating will cost $10 (general),
$7 (seniors), and $5 (students). Tickets are available at the
door or by calling x2306. For more information, call Melhorn at
x2018.
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