SEQUIM — When creating a concert, maestro Dewey Ehling does not shy away from difficult music.
If it is beautiful, he wants to bring it to people.
So it is that Ehling, wife Lauretta and the rest of the Peninsula Singers will present operatic works in four languages — from seven composers — in concerts at Trinity United Methodist Church, 100 S. Blake Ave., this weekend.
The Ehlings invite everybody, schooled in opera or not, to the pair of performances at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $15 for adults and $12 for seniors and students for the concerts featuring arias and choruses from Handel, Verdi, Delibes, Wagner, Puccini and, for light good measure, Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Gondoliers.”
Dewey is a serious scholar of music but not a serious fellow when titling his concerts.
‘Spaghetti, Sauerkraut’
This one’s called “Spaghetti and Sauerkraut,” since it brings together the Italian opera masters Verdi and Puccini with Handel and Wagner, a couple of Germans.
With the versatile pianist Linda Dowdell providing accompaniment, the Peninsula Singers will offer selections from Handel’s opera “Acis and Galatea” and the “Gypsy” sequence from Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.” Also on the program are “Walther’s Prize Song” from Wagner’s “Die Meistersingers” and, from Delibes’ “Lakmé,” the famed “Flower Duet.”
Featured soloists include soprano Cynthia Webster, mezzo-soprano Vicki Helwick and tenor Robin Reed, a new member of the Peninsula Singers.
“You will love to hear him,” Dewey promises.
Another sequence will be from Puccini’s one-act opera, “Suor Angelica”: first a nun’s chorus, and then soprano Hannah Hockett will sing “Senza Mamma,” an aria Dewey describes as touching and brilliant.
“The chorus brings closure with a final ‘Amen,’ brilliantly and simply stated,” he adds.
To finish the concerts’ first half, the chorus will sing the Easter hymn, “Regina Coeli,” from Mascagni’s opera “Cavalleria Rusticana,” with Sally Spencer singing the role of Santuzza and Joel Yelland singing Manrico.
The second half is given over to “The Gondoliers,” the comic opera that is “witty, full of surprises and just plain enjoyable from start to finish,” Dewey says.
Hockett, Bonnie Christianson, Trent Pomeroy and Ray Chirayath make up the cast with assistance from Yelland, Spencer, Valerie Lape, Carl Honore, John Silver and Dorothy Hensey.
Brian Doig, in his first outing as a soloist since undergoing a double lung transplant a few years ago, will also sing in “Gondoliers.”
The soloists, Lauretta noted, “are extraordinary.”
Discussing this weekend’s musical program with her husband, she remarked that it covers the gamut of moods.
“A lot of it is just fun,” she said.
“And oh, the ‘Suor Angelica.’ It is such a beautiful thing . . . very emotional.”
First soprano
A first soprano with the Peninsula Singers since 1988, Lauretta is continually astonished that she can still sing so high.
She adores this operatic music. When she and Dewey traveled to Portland, Ore., to see Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” some years ago, she remembers having goose bumps the entire day.
For Dewey, who is in his late 80s, hearing the Peninsula Singers — and the Port Townsend Community Orchestra, which he also leads — remains a thrill.
Health issues prevent him from doing much physical work these days. But there’s no question that this man can still bring people together in song.
Music, he says, “is my savior.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
