Telluride Choral Society: SpringSing, “Take Flight,” 3/23

15 Mar Telluride Choral Society: SpringSing, “Take Flight,” 3/23

The Telluride Choral Society‘s SpringSing celebrates flight – or rather that wonderful feeling of soaring when your heart takes wing. The concert, “Take Flight,” takes place Friday, March 23, 7 p.m. at Telluride’s Christ Church. Tickets, $20 for adults: $10 for children, at the door. For more information, please call (970)729-0082.

The man recorded the best known version of the tune in 1964 for the album It Might As Well Be Swing.

Sadly, however, Sinatra will not be in the house.

But even in the absence of Old Blue Eyes, there will be lots of flying to the moon and playing among those stars.

Checking out what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars.

The theme of the Telluride Choral Society’s SpringSing is, per its inspiring artistic director Rhonda Muckerman, “Take Flight.”

“What is it that calls our attention to the skies? There exists a feeling of flight, of getting beyond what it is we know, to the extraordinary, the unexpected, the limitless. I have always enjoyed the moment that occurs while flying when we break through the clouds and can no longer see the cities and landscape below, but have only a vision of the infinite, clear, blue heavens,” said Muckerman.

In 1941, Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee wrote in his famous poem, “High Flight”: “Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.” 

Sinatra’s tune, Magee, and many other greats informed and inspired Muckerman to mine a rich history of musically soaring.

And as it turned out, there is an abundance of flight-related imagery in vocal music through the ages from the Peruvian classic “El Condor” to the Beatles’ “Blackbird”–“take these broken wings and learn to fly”– to the contemporary choral settings of “High Flight” and “Sitivit Anima Mea.”

The Choral Society’s program features all of those pieces, as well as an original work by Telluride local (and mainstay of the nonprofit), Dalen Stevens, entitled “Where the Wild Bird Flies.”

In its 25th year, the Telluride Choral Society is pleased to present Telluride community’s voices, from its youngest ranks in the Training Choir, Choristers and OmniVoce, to the most experienced musicians of the Chorale and Chamber Singers, all directed by Muckerman and accompanied on piano by Susan Ensor. 

“We are especially pleased to welcome our local string orchestra, the Telluride Camerata, in the first of what we hope to be many collaborations in the future,” added Muckerman.