Have you ever heard a song that makes your tummy do a little flip just because the music is so lovely? And the pearly tones of the voices meld in a harmony so sweet and warm that you fear for the melting sensation down the back of your spine?

Have you ever heard a song that expresses ideas, pains, longings that seem to be pulling directly from your own soul?

Do you like to watch people perform their own songs and share about why the music matters to them?

Have you ever heard a small group of people sing their hearts out with some Slavic music?

Beauty Awake: a spring stirring of music by Nathan and Naomi Bird and Friends

Tuesday, May 22, 2012 – 7:00 pm

Cross of Glory Baptist Church in Hopkins, MN 4600 Shady Oak Rd. (map)

admission: free

This concert is centered on some ideas that we associate with the spring season: sunshine, starting over, freshness, birth…the freeness of all of the emerging life as we transition into this warmer season. We also are celebrating the inspriational and beautiful process of collaboration by sharing the stage with a few of our colleagues in the arts.

Soprano Christine Anderson will be performing two Sondheim songs – “Green Finch and Linnet Bird,” and “I Remember” – both of which cause one to think anew of the things that make spring so spcial.  Birds singing, freedom, sky.

Singer/song-writer Ry Edwards is sharing three of his original folk/rock songs that each offer beautiful insights into very ‘spring-esque’ elements – a simple sparrow, a sunrise, and splashing in puddles.

Singer and pianist Ami Andersen is also sharing three of her songs – “Looking for the Sun,” a new setting of “Great is Thy Faithfulness,” and an original hymn sung as a duet with Nathan Bird.

The program will conclude with three Ukrainian art songs and a choral number. With texts by Taras Shevchenko and music by Ivan Mychik, these pieces are not [yet] part of the vocal music canon and perhaps have never before been performed.  They were handed to Nathan by the composer with the request to perform them and share them with others –  so now six years later we are finally doing just that.

The choral piece is being performed by an ensemble of colleagues and friends who have joined us specifically for this program. Some are professional musicians.  Some are former music majors.  All have been bitten by that crazy bug – similar to the mosquito, but different – that makes us have this insatiable thirst for participating in vocal ensembles just because they are so darn fun.  The dissonant harmonies and constantly changing meters of Mychik’s music have that uniquely Slavic feel that pull and twist and swell and blossom throught the journey of the song.  It really is going to be a treat.