CHIMACUM — Songs of Shakespeare will be presented Saturday and Sunday at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Chimacum.
The first of RainShadow Chorale’s fall season concerts will be at 7 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday at the church art, 45 Redeemer Way in Chimacum.
The suggested donation at the door is $20 for an adult, $10 for a student, or pay as able.
Songs of Shakespeare will be Laurie de Leonne’s debut concert as artistic director for RainShadow Chorale.
The concert will include a variety of songs and styles, all set to texts from Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets.
“I had previously thought of William Shakespeare’s work as high, lofty and unapproachable,” said de Leonne, a classical musician, composer and choir builder from Seattle.
“Singing a text can remove the barrier of formality and introduce audiences and performers to texts in a new way. Through music, it’s now hard to miss Shakespeare’s humor, bawdiness, romance, poignance and lightness present in his work,” she continued.
“These artistic choral settings bring Shakespeare down to earth and make him as approachable as if he were in the audience with us.”
De Leonne said if the Songs of Shakespeare concert had a subtitle, it would be Art Songs Are More Than Just Classical Music.
“I’d not previously known the music of George Shearing,” she said. “He was visually impaired and improvised at the keyboard as a professional jazz pianist while a colleague notated the work. His arrangements of five songs in ‘Music to Hear’ musically fuse classical art song and jazz.”
The concert also features country music art song and barbershop art song next to the classical Henry Purcell and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
“Singers are the only musicians where words are part of our musical craft,” de Leonne said. “When text is put to music, both the words and the music itself are elevated to a creative art that is greater than the sum of its parts. Starting with texts by Shakespeare and fusing it with music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Henry Purcell, George Shearing and Matthew Harris, to name a few, I knew we had all the ingredients for a magnificent concert, even before adding into the mix the talented vocalists of RainShadow.”
De Leonne said RainShadow Chorale rehearsals are a highlight of each week, “and remind me of a saying: Some people get to see their favorite groups once in a lifetime, but I get to see mine every week.”
The concert is sponsored in part by the Port Townsend Arts Commission.
