Our History
Photo Credit Leif Nesheim, The Sequim Gazette
Peninsula Singers began in 1988 as a chamber group called Peninsula Chamber Singers. Dennis Crabbe, Director of Music at Peninsula College, started the group and in 1990 Dewey Ehling took over as conductor and has directed for the past 17 years. In 2005, the name was changed to Peninsula Singers to reflect the larger and growing size of the chorale. Though the group started as a chamber group it has expanded its size in order to do large choral works with orchestra. It retains its chamber concept, however, and will occasionally feature a chamber group in concerts.
The singers are made up of experienced singers from the North Olympic Peninsula. Many have had college experience, some professional. A few are music majors. The goal of all is to sing the best choral literature available. While we have mostly post-college singers, we do include a few younger inexperienced singers who have shown vocal promise and the desire to gain experience and familiarity with the repertoire.
Among the hundreds of works performed in the past years are the Bach Magnificat, Gounod's St Cecilia Mass, Beethoven Mass in C, The Requiems of Faure, Durufle, Mozart and Brahms, Carmina Burana of Carl Orff, Vaughan Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem, Handel's Messiah, Vivaldi's Gloria, Schubert's Mass in G, Solemn Vespers by Mozart; Shicksalslied, Brahms, and much more. We have done selections from major musical productions such as Steven Sondheim's Into the Woods, Andrew Lloyd Weber's Cats, and several full-length productions of Menotti's Amal and the Night Visitor in full costume and staging. In addition we have performed many art, folk and gospel works by various composers.
We are still growing! We will continue to perform the finest choral work by classic and contemporary composers of all persuasions for all audiences.
Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007) - The Italian born, American composer Gian Carlo Menotti wrote his first opera even before he began his formal musical education, at the Milan Conservatory, which he entered when he was only thirteen years old. Four years later he came to the United States for advanced study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and it was here that he made his career as a composer of operas and concert music. A few years after his graduation from Curtis Institute, the school’s opera department produced Menotti’s one-act Amelia Goes to the Ball with such success that in less than a year later it was also performed by the Metropolitan Opera.
In 1951 on commission of NBC, he wrote the first opera ever written for television, Amahl and the Night Visitors. It is an opera for children, the composer said, and it recalls his own Italian childhood, when Christmas gifts were brought not by Santa Claus but by the Three Kings, who are the opera’s “Night Visitors.” Menotti recalled, “..in 1951 I found myself in serious difficulty: I had been commissioned by the National Broadcasting Company to write an opera for television, with Christmas as a deadline, and simply didn’t have one idea in my head. One November afternoon as I was walking rather gloomily through the rooms of the Metropolitan Museum, I chanced to stop in front of the Adoration of the Kings by Hieronymous Bosch, and as I was looking at it suddenly I heard again, coming from the distant blue hills the weird song of the Three Kings. I then realized they had come back to me and had brought me a gift.”
Here’s a condensed version of Amahl and the Night Visitors: Amahl, a poor, crippled shepherd boy is sitting at the door of his humble cottage, playing a tune on his pipe, when he sees a great star cross the sky like a fiery chariot. Soon the Three Kings and their Page who are following the star to Bethlehem appear. Amahl’s mother invites them to stop and rest, though she has no fire and can offer them only a bed of straw. The Kings enter and prepare to spend the night. They show the wondrous gifts they are bearing to a mysterious newborn child, and they tell of his mother, who is also a virgin and a queen. Soon other shepherds crowd around and dance to entertain the visitors. When all settle down for the night Amahl’s poor mother is tempted to take some of their gold for her crippled child. In a dramatic moment, when she is found out and relents, Amahl says that he will add to the store of gifts his most precious possession, his crutch – and as he does so he is miraculously cured and can walk, run, jump and dance. Then dawn breaks, and as the Kings continue their journey, Amahl joins their procession, piping as he goes.
Notes by Leonard Burkat
