Summer Music Festival 2008

Church of the Good Shepherd   
715 Kirkman Street  
Lake Charles, Louisiana

Tuesday evenings in June

Concerts begin at 7:30 p.m.

Prepare to laugh, to shed a tear, to dream, and to enjoy the splendid twenty-first season of the Summer Music Festival.  From a wacky séance concert to the music of the angels, you will hear a little bit of pop, country, folk rock, jazz, folk music, opera, symphony, and ragtime.  There is something for each of you, so beat a path to the Church of the Good Shepherd every Tuesday night in June.  We don’t want to rock without you.

June 3        What do these famous female singers have in common: The Andrews Sisters, Karen Carpenter, Cass Elliot, Renata Tebaldi, Maria Callas, Ethel Merman, Judy Garland, Peggy Lee, Dusty Springfield, and Patsy Cline?  Well, they’re all dead, but hang on—we’re about to make contact with them at Just Heaven—The Séance Concert.

Patti Rabaza and Julia Kay Laskowski will be our guides through the spirit world.  With pianist Jay Whatley, the two sopranos bring all the stars back to life. From “Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree,” “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” “Everything’s Comin’ Up Roses,” and “Goldfinger,” to Patsy Cline’s “San Antonio Rose,” and “Lovesick Blues,” this will be an experience bordering on the supernatural.

June 10      First Class Brass is a perfect summer’s evening entertainment, with a mix of music from the Old World and the New arranged for brass quintet.  Ambient Brass, with Dan Shipman and Theresa Hanebury, trumpets, Laura Kirk, French horn, Brian Logan, trombone, and Mark Barton, tuba will perform music from Contrapunctus I of J. S. Bach, an Intrada by Johann Pezel, a quintet by Bellon, as well as American classics such as Scott Joplin’s ragtime favorites The Entertainer and Maple Leaf Rag, music from Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring; Trumpeter’s Lullaby, by Leroy Anderson, and selections from Bernstein’s West Side Story.

June 17      About the same time as the founding of America, far across the sea in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the inventive, humorous, soon-to-be master of the Classical style Franz Josef Haydn was experimenting with the genre known as the symphony. Innovations is the name of the program, and an innovator he was.  The Festival Orchestra will perform one of his very early, charming works, and then turn to the music of two remarkably creative American composers, Aaron Jay Kernis and David Amram.  Kernis, born in 1960 and Composer in Residence of the Minnesota Orchestra, gives us music inspired by the medieval conception of the singing of the angels in praise of God in his Musica Celestis for String Orchestra.  David Amram, a horn player and pianist who has played with Charlie Mingus and Thelonious Monk, and written scores for films such as The Manchurian Candidate and Splendor in the Grass, gives us his jazzy, lyrical Shakespearean Concerto for Oboe and Two Horns, based on music he wrote for Joseph Papp’s outdoor Shakespeare Festival in New York City.

June 24     Explore the mysterious world of Myths and Legends in our final concert presented by Trio Angelica, with mezzo soprano Sonja Bruzauskas, Jennifer Keeney, flute, and Anita Kruse, piano.  The myth of the god Pan who pursued the unwilling nymph Syrinx is represented in music of Debussy and Albert Roussel. That of Orpheus, the god of music who followed his love Eurydice into the Underworld realm of Pluto is taken from an opera by Gluck, and Schubert set the story of Ganymede, a Trojan prince kidnapped by Zeus.  Houston composer Paul English, who wrote MUSAIC, a tribute to seven muses, Euterpe, Urania, Polyhymnia, Calliope, Melpomene, Clio and Erato, will attend and introduce his own work.

For more information, call (337) 433-5244

Interested in finding out more about the arts at Good Shepherd? 
For more information, contact the church office.

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