Arts This Week: Christmas at The Paramount
By Ben Larsen
Ella Powell:
You are listening to WTJU. This Saturday, December 20, at 2:30 pm, and 7 pm, join the Charlottesville Oratorio Society for Christmas at The Paramount. Let the magic of choral music welcome you into a holiday trance of joy and laughter with friends and family. For Arts This Week, we spoke with Michael Slon, the music director of the Oratorio Society.
Michael Slon:
Greetings to listeners. My name is Michael Slon. I’m the music director of the Oratorio Society here in town, and also professor and director of choral music at the University of Virginia.
Ella Powell:
So I understand you’re kicking off the 58th season of the Oratorio Society with this concert, has this been a tradition since you started as the music director?
Michael Slon:
Yeah, great question. So it has been a tradition since I started as music director. I started with the group in 2011, so that was the first year I conducted one of these at The Paramount. And they had only just started them a few years earlier. Because, as you know, probably the Paramount only reopened in town, around 2006. The group used to do the concert elsewhere, including at old Cabell Hall, where I now do family holiday concerts with our UVA groups. The size of the concert has grown, and we now feature youth choirs at both of the afternoon and the evening concerts as guest groups, but the audience has also
happily built up for these concerts. Yeah.
Ella Powell:
So when you say both concerts, I guess are there two performances?
Michael Slon:
That’s correct. So there’s a 2:30 afternoon concert and then a 7:30pm concert. And other than the mercurial aspects of a live performance, they’re entirely the same in terms of repertoire, except for the guest groups, because the guest groups, there’s one at 2:30 and there’s a different one at 7:30
Ella Powell:
Can you share a little bit about the guest groups for this year?
Michael Slon:
There’s a group called Voces Laetae, which is directed by my colleague, Will Cook, who also works at Charlottesville High School. That’s a high school age group that he offers free of charge, and we’ve partnered with them for a couple years now, and then also, I think it’s now called Trailblazer Elementary, and their director, Michael Salvatori, they’re bringing a youth choir, and I think it’s going to be like 40 or 50 children, which is really quite wonderful.
Ella Powell:
Could you describe choral music? What draws you to this form of music?
Michael Slon:
Interesting. So, you know, first of all, choral music we think of as not a solo voice, but a group of people, sometimes singing in unison, but most often singing in parts. Typically four parts might be standard, like soprano, alto, tenor, bass. It becomes not just a sing along, which is its own thing, but this kind of beautiful, polished and transformative art form. And it certainly has to be one of the earliest art forms, if you think about going back in history, people just blending their voices together, right in some kind of artistic expression or other expression. So I think it’s a wonderful thing that we have the oratory society in the community, where we have over 100 people now who have auditioned. You know, on this concert, we’ll sing everything from very familiar carols, but in four or eight part harmony with the orchestra and an organ and the piano and so on. But also we tend to feature on this concert a larger work, and then this year it’s going to be the Camille Saint-Saëns’ Christmas Oratorio, which is with chorus soloists. We’ll have some professional soloists with us, strings, harp and organ. So that should be also very lovely.
Ella Powell:
And what makes this a special concert to open the season with?
Michael Slon:
It just happens to be that the first thing we do, you know, if you start in September and then you go to May or June, for example, it happens to be this concert, and then in the spring, just to look ahead, we have our together in song in March. And we have a, usually a big, major work concert in May, typically. And this year, that’ll be Mendelson’s Elijah in the past. It’s been, you know, Beethoven 9, and we did Bach B minor, and we’ve had World Premiere by Adolphus, a poem by Rita Dove in the past. So a lot of different big pieces there. But it just happens that this is our kind of first major concert of the year. We’ve done some run outs and so on. And I think it’s wonderful because you have joyful listeners at the Paramount who may not typically otherwise, go, you know, to what we might call classical or art music concerts. And because it’s the holidays, people love to hear music. And I think it’s important for us, right? It’s we’re looking for something, perhaps deeper. At the holidays, there’s certain traditions we love to return to every year.
Ella Powell:
No, it’s definitely a great time of the year to bring community together. What are you looking forward to for the rest of the season? I saw that you have your Bicentennial concert in March as well.
Michael Slon:
Yeah, good point. So as you know, and all the listeners know, America turns 250 next year. And so I thought it would be interesting, especially in the region we live in, where Jefferson was such an important figure. And of course, he penned the Declaration of Independence to do not just one, but multiple concerts. So I have a group University Singers at UVA will do in America. America, 250 concert and Oratorio will also do one, and there’ll be different pieces on each program. And one of the pieces we’re going to do is a piece by American composer Howard Hanson called Song of democracy. It’s based on
some Walt Whitman poetry. And I’m sure we’ll do other American pieces, you know, Randall Thompson, and would do something by Irving Berlin, as we look to this huge anniversary.
Ella Powell:
I wanted to ask you, personally, what do you find most fulfilling about being the music director of the Oratorio Society?
Michael Slon:
Combining this with my work at UVA, where I work mainly with students, it gives me a deeper connection to the community, right? So every week, I see over 100 people from different walks of life who share in common not just a passion for but a talent for singing, and we have a chance to get together and work on attaining a higher level of that choral art form in what we do together. And these are people, I mean, you’d be amazed at all the different walks of life, you know, represented from professors and students to
nurses and astrophysicists and lawyers and doctors and stay at home parents and people who are young and still figuring out what they’re going to do in life. You know, all these people come together across, so to speak, generations, and they become a whole through our weekly rehearsal. And it for me, it’s very fulfilling to guide that endeavor as the artistic leader of the group, and to see how, in conjunction, for example, with our Executive Director, Christine Fairfield, who’s very good, just to see how the group has grown.
Ella Powell:
Have you been with a lot of the same singers, like within your time with the group, or
have you seen a lot of people come and go?
Michael Slon:
That’s an interesting question, too. So there is certainly, I would think, less turnover than a UVA group, because people aren’t graduating, right? Yeah, and then going on to some other place in life, at UVA, I don’t have most people more than four years, right? So there are people who have been in the group since I started, and they’ve been in the group way longer than I’ve been there. I mean, we have one soprano who has basically been in the group 50 years, almost its entire existence, and that’s very special. But we have people who just came in a couple months ago, and you know. It partly depends on demographic too, right? I mean, some people are younger and more fluid in terms of where they’re going to live in life. So they may be here for grad school, and then they move away to somewhere else. Some people may be here for life, and then this is where they’ve kind of planted themselves, and they’re growing and so this is where they can then be part of a group for a longer time. So, you know, it’s, it’s some of each but it helps to, I must say, it helps to try to retain the good singers, because then you can, just like any team, you can build a sense of our ideals, what we are really striving for as an ensemble.
Ella Powell:
Yeah, I guess my last question would just be, if you can share a little bit about the Oratorio Society’s role in Charlottesville, I guess for you know the role it has in the music scene, but also just the impact on the community.
Michael Slon:
We’re fortunate, even in a town that’s not a huge city, to have a number of choral organizations, right? And of course, I lead University Singers and Chamber Singers at UVA, but as I mentioned, that’s more geared to students. So really, the Oratorio Society is the longest running Community Chorus in this area. What I’m proud of, in part from my time, is that we haven’t just done our own concerts. We’ve collaborated with a lot of ensembles. So since I took over in 2011 we’ve certainly collaborated with Charlottesville ballet. We’ve collaborated multiple times with Charlottesville opera. It’s one of our enjoyable partners. We’ve been with the University Singers and the symphony on various projects. We’ve been with a lot of youth choirs. We’ve commissioned composers, you know, and the list goes on. So partly, how we contribute to the art scene is not just as a course, but as a chorus who engages with other art forms to see what we might be able to create in terms of the impact on the community as a whole. I just think there are a lot of things that pull us apart from each other, right? And this is something that brings us together. And regardless of people’s viewpoints on other matters, or whatever the case may be, they can come together. You have a fascinating demographic, and I think that’s good for the community, when people have a meaningful way to come together on a weekly basis and achieve something beautiful.
Ella Powell:
At the start of each season, do you have auditions for this?
Michael Slon:
Absolutely, at least twice a year. So late August, September, we have auditions. And then January, we also will have auditions. Sometimes, occasionally we also have them in March, depending on what we’re working on in the season. So talented singers who may be hearing this are welcome to visit our website, oratoriosociety.org just to find out more about the group. Look forward to seeing you and happy holidays to everybody
Ella Powell:
This Saturday, December 20th, join the Charlottesville Oratorio Society for Christmas at the Paramount, a Choral music performance directed by Michael Slon. The historic Paramount is located at the center of the downtown mall and tickets may be purchased in advance on The Paramount website. For more information on the Oratorio society, visit Oratoriosociety.org.
Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance, music, theater, and visual arts programming. Learn more at pvcc.edu For WTJU, I’m Ella Powell.
