Arcady set to ring in festive season

Music lovers can ring in the festive season with Arcady’s professional and youth choruses, soloists, and instrumental ensemble.

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Christmas With Arcady will be presented on November 30 at 7:30 pm at St. Andrew’s United Church in Brantford.

“I’ve done a Christmas performance every year since I was nine years old. I used to do them in the house at home and would invite the neighbors,” said Arcady’s artistic director and composer Ron Beckett. “I recorded on the reel-to-reel and played that back while I played piano to create the impression of an ensemble. Eventually things moved out of the house and into theaters and churches, and I incorporated more musicians to help me.”

Things really took off for Arcady following their 2001 CD release Welcome Yule featuring Beckett’s original pieces and arrangements. Toronto classical music and concert magazine The Whole Note ranked Welcome Yule as the second-highest CD release of the entire year.

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Since then, the annual Christmas with Arcady presentation maintains the flavor of Welcome Yule with alterations made each year.

Along with traditional classics, new holiday works by Arcady’s own composers will be featured. Brantford composer Emma Theresa Verdonk’s The Christmas Blessing will feature her sister Adriana Verdonk as the soprano soloist, while Vittoria’s Shawn Oakes will showcase his arrangement of A Sussex Carol. Toronto composer Benjamin Gabbay will treat patrons to Bergandacht (Mountain Prayer), a setting of an 18th century traditional Austrian Christmas yodel featuring soprano soloist Sophia Korz.

For the show opener, Beckett has arranged a dramatized setting of Touro-louro-louro by French classic composer Nicolas Saboly.

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“I think at Christmas time the audience wants more of the familiar than they would at other times of the year,” Beckett noted. “The instrumentalists are all hand-picked and the best of their craft, who I’ve worked with for years.

“There’s also a mixture of the old and the new, as we introduce the Emerging Artists who are graduates of university programs who are midway between their student and professional careers.”

Local members of the Arcady Youth Singers are incorporated into a number of the selections to be performed, including a poem called I Live written by Niesje Van’t Hoff that Beckett has set to music.

“The goal of this concert is to send people home in a good mood,” he said. “It’s a festive time of year and a festive concert. The moods of joy, happiness and gratitude pervade.”

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Arcady will also perform Handel’s Messiah at Grace Bible Church in Cambridge on December 7, and at the Waterford Old Town Hall on December 20. The show was built off their 1999 CD release, A Baroque Messiah, resulting in a wave of interest that continues to this day.

“I think people like the (baroque) style, and it follows the smaller venues because we use fewer people,” the artistic director explained. “The chamber orchestra has eight in number, along with about a dozen singers, all of whom have solos. It makes for a pretty vibrant and exciting chorus.”

Tickets are available at arcady.ca or by calling 519-428-3185.

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