The snow is falling and it’s time to get into the holiday spirit, a sentiment Bowdoin and the surrounding community are embracing by hosting a variety of holiday concerts in the coming weeks.
This weekend, the Bowdoin Chorus and the Mozart Mentors Orchestra are performing an array of French Christmas choral works, and next weekend the Down East Singers will perform Russian Christmas carols with the St. Petersburg Men’s Ensemble, on visit from Russia.
Anthony Antolini ’63, a senior lecturer in music at Bowdoin, has worked as the director of both the Bowdoin Chorus and the Down East Singers—a community chorus based in Rockport—for 21 years. Since graduating from Bowdoin, Antolini has had an impressive career in music and spent a great deal of time promoting, conducting and organizing concerts like the ones next week.
“I was in the Meddiebempsters when I was at Bowdoin and I was president of the Glee Club,” Antolini said. “Those were my days of singing…I’m seventy years old now so I don’t do much singing anymore, it’s mostly conducting and organ playing. I’ve been doing music a long time.”
Antolini’s experience, combined with a passion for making, studying and sharing music, has made him a valuable asset to the music scene at Bowdoin and in the surrounding communities. In addition to conducting the Bowdoin Chorus and the Down East Singers, he is the music director and organist at the Episcopal Church of St. John Baptist in Thomaston.
Three years ago, Antolini founded the Mozart Mentors Orchestra, a group of junior high and high school age string players and their teachers from all over southern Maine. The Mozart Mentors will accompany the Bowdoin Chorus this weekend on Saturday and Sunday afternoons in Studzinski Recital Hall.
“It’s a French Christmas program,” Antolini said of the concert. “A tribute to Maine’s French cultural heritage. It involves not only French music from France, but French music from all around this area. It should be very exciting.”
The concert, titled “Noël Français,” will include Christmas carols all sung in French, with some audience sing-alongs that will sound familiar in their English translations. The featured work will be Charpentier’s Masse de Minuit.
The following weekend will feature performances by Antolini’s Down East Singers and the St. Petersburg Men’s Ensemble. This prestigious Russian quartet will reflect their culture and heritage by singing both secular works by Russian composers and traditional Russian folk songs.
The evening’s repertoire, including collaborations between the two choruses, will consist of sacred works by Bortniansky, Ippolitov-Ivanov, Stravinsky, Chesnokov, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, as well as seasonal folk songs by Kalistratov, Leontovich and Prokhorov.
“The first half of the concert is just [the St. Petersburg Men’s Ensemble] singing by themselves,” said Antolini. “And the second half is some church music, some Christmas music, Russian Christmas music, followed by Russian folk songs having to do with Christmas and wintertime.”
These concerts will feature piano accompaniment from Jennifer McIvor, who is in her third season with the ensemble, and moose bones percussion from Michael Scholz. Scholz, a specialist from Nova Scotia, will perform a traditional Russian folk song with the St. Petersburg Men’s Ensemble and will also join the Bowdoin Chorus this weekend for their final number, a Quebec folk song.
“It’s a folk song that originally involves wooden spoons…but we thought it would be a nice Maine touch to use moose bones,” said Antolini. “If we don’t like the moose bones sound he can also play sheep bones, but the moose I think are the better sound. They have a bigger impact.”
The Bowdoin Chorus and Mozart Mentors Orchestra will perform in Studzinski Recital Hall on Saturday and Sunday, December 1 and 2 at 2:00 p.m. The concerts are free and tickets are not required. The Down East Singers will perform with the St. Petersburg Men’s Ensemble on Thursday, December 6 at 7:30 p.m. at St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church (380 Academy Hill Road, Newcastle) and Sunday, December 9 at 2:30 p.m. at Camden Opera House (29 Elm Street, Camden). Tickets are $20—free for students under 18—and can be purchased online at downeastsingers.com or at the door on the day of the performance. The St. Petersburg Men’s Ensemble will also perform unaccompanied in the Bowdoin Chapel on Saturday, December 7 at 7:30 p.m. The event is open to the public.