MMS to Present Annual Winter Chorus Concert Monday

Story provided by the Millburn Township School District

Millburn Middle School choruses in their annual Winter Chorus Concert on Monday evening will perform show tunes, classical and popular selections and songs from around the world.

The Sixth Grade Chorus will open the program with Al Shlosha D’Varim, an ode to the values of truth, justice, and peace, with soloists Oliver Pickering and Caitlin Caulfield.  The enduring favorite Dashing through the Snow will come next, and the inspirational Hands United in Peace will follow.  The Sixth Grade Girls will perform The Rainbow Connection, a song featured in both the current film The Muppets and the original 1979 Muppet Movie. Neha Bhardwaj, Rachel Brown, Helen Casey, Leah Green, Kate Parker-Lentz, Vivian Murphy, Megan Pan, and Christine Cai will sing the descant. The Sixth Grade boys will perform the nautically themed The Sailor’s Life for Me, featuring soloists David Jordan and Christopher Ren.

Soloists Eloise Burn, Audrey Yan, Luke Wroblewski, and Brady Young will open the Seventh Grade portion of the evening, leading the chorus in the Renaissance canon Sing Dem Herrn by Michael Praetorius.  A celebration of winter called Something Told the Wild Geese will follow, then the chorus will sing an energetic Hungarian Csardas entitled Dance, Dance, Dance. 

The Eighth Grade Chorus will begin with the first of three contrasting selections, a Renaissance style “Ayre” entitled Glad We Be this Day, with soloists Sarah Jordan and Jackie Blair, and with instrumental accompaniment by Emma Solimine, oboe, Beide Zhao, flute, Emily Torre, cello, and Dan Stern and Courtney Cooperman on percussion.  The Eighth Graders will also sing Grandma’s Feather Bed, an arrangement of the 1972 John Denver hit song, with Elizabeth Gray, soloist, and featuring Dylan Davis and Nicole Landreman, then a Ukranian carol, the favorite Carol of the Bells.

The combined Seventh and Eighth Grade Girls’ Chorus will sing a familiar duet from the opera Lakmé entitled “Dôme Epais,” here arranged for girls’ chorus.  The boys of the Seventh and Eighth Grade will then sing a selection from German “lieder” entitled Die Forelle (The Trout) by Franz Schubert.

The MMS Select Chorus will close the evening with a selection supposedly written by a Baroque composer PDQ Bach, who is actually the contemporary composer Peter Schickele.  This tongue-in-cheek madrigal, My Bonnie Lass, She Smelleth,  is one of a pair of tunes from The Triumphs of Thusnelda.

Student accompanists are eighth grader Amy Zhuang, seventh graders Kevin Lin, Alexander Liu, and Adam Liu, and sixth graders Corinne Au and Christine Cai. 

All ensembles are under the direction of Millburn Middle School Chorus Director, Mr. David Huneryager.

The program will be presented in the Middle School Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 19.  (Note that this is a change from the previously scheduled date of Dec. 20).Admission is free, and the public is cordially invited to attend.