Middleton Community Orchestra

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Brian Ruppert

Middleton Community Orchestra at Hamel Music Center.

Middleton Community Orchestra

media release: Tickets $20 at the door and at Willy St. Coop West. Students admitted free of charge.

Isabel Celata, soprano

Madison Barrett, mezzo-soprano

Thomas Kasdorf, piano

Christopher Ramaekers, conductor

Beethoven: Overture “Leonore” No. 3 in C Major, Op. 72b (1805)

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 19 (1787-1789), featuring Thomas Kasdorf

Yeston: December Songs (1991), featuring Isabel Celata and Madison Barrett

December Songs is a song cycle by musical theatre composer-lyricist Maury Yeston. The work is a "retelling" of Franz Schubert's Winterreise, (a song cycle of art songs), with a cabaret sensibility. The songs in both December Songs and Winterreise are linked as a sequence of reflections by the singer taking a lonely walk in winter, thinking back on his or her lost love.

The piece crosses over the line from classical music to Broadway to cabaret. Where the Schubert masterpiece features words by Wilhelm Müller portraying a jilted young man's wandering the snows of the Vienna woods and ultimately sinking into madness, the Yeston lyrics depict a contemporary young woman wandering a snowy Central Park in New York City and finding recovery and hope on her journey.

December Songs pictures in richly varied melodies and striking yet unforced poetic images, a worldly young woman, jilted and adrift in a wintry New York City, reading all she sees for commentary on her broken heart.

It has been recorded six times in English, and once each in French, German, and Polish.