Alumni Artists Series to Present the Music of the Concord Ensemble

A performance of Renaissance vocal music by the Concord Ensemble --- "Sweetest of Memories: A Program of Musical Parodies" --- will kick off the Alumni Artists Series. The free concert will take place on Saturday, October 27, at 8:15 p.m. in Ford Hall.

"I owe a great deal of my love for music to my parents, who exposed me and my sisters to great music at a very early age," says Pablo Corá ’95, a tenor and founding member of the all-male sextet. "Growing up in a suburb of Buenos Aires, I sang with a group of friends in a chamber group called Young Voices. We sang some superlative vocal literature, but I was definitively hooked once we began working on Johann Sebastian Bach’s Magnificat in D. I eventually began taking voice lessons, and the rest is history."

Corá earned a bachelor’s degree in voice performance from Ithaca. He then enrolled in a doctoral program at Indiana University, where he and five fellow singers formed the Concord Ensemble in 1996. The group’s specialty --- Renaissance music --- will be evident at the October 27 performance, which will feature Doulce memoire and works based on this celebrated French song of the early 16th century. Believed to have been written by King François I during his Neapolitan exile, the song’s text expresses the banished king’s bittersweet longing for his native land. The original music was reprinted, arranged, and adapted for many different uses; the ensemble’s performance will reflect these developments by including a mass by Cipriano de Rore, a magnificat by Clemens non Papa, and several other 16th-century variations.

Called "painters in music, builders of noble sonorities, and vanquishers of counterpoint and cross-rhythms" by the Bloomington, Indiana, Herald-Times, the Concord Ensemble has come a long way in its relatively short existence. A regularly featured vocal sextet at the Bloomington Early Music Festival, where it has premiered several newly discovered manuscripts of sacred Latin American colonial works, the ensemble collaborates with such renowned instrumental ensembles as the Philadelphia Renaissance wind band Piffaro and the Washington-based Folger Consort.

In 1998 the ensemble won the grand prize at the Early Music America/Dorian Recording Competition and went on to make its European debut at the Tage Alter Musik (Days of Old Music) festival in Germany, where the group was hailed as one of the most important discoveries in the early music scene. The group made its first commercial recording, The Victory of Santiago: Voices of Renaissance Spain, in 1999.

The remaining members of the Concord Ensemble are Daniel Carberg (tenor), Daniel Cole (bass), Paul Flight (countertenor), N. Lincoln Hanks (tenor), and Sumner Thompson (baritone). More information is available at www.concordensemble.com.

The Alumni Artists Series was started this year to bring to campus ensembles that are under professional management and have College alumni as founding members. The next concert will take place on Thursday, February 7, and feature the Chicago Chamber Musicians with hornist Gail Williams ’73.

More information on concerts at Ithaca College is available at www.ithaca.edu/concerts.