Why Beauty? Why now? When faced with inhumanity and cruelty, we should not respond in kind, but rather with humanity and compassion. Bel Canto focuses in this concert on what is beautiful in the world and in each other, by presenting music for choir, piano, strings and percussion on the beauty of nature and of the spirit, “that we may choose something like a star, to stay our minds on, and be staid.” (Robert Frost)

Selections range from Classical to Contemporary to African American Spirituals, Folk and Shape Note, with compositions by J.F. Haydn, Brahms, Jake Runestad, Alice Parker, Jacob Narverud, and more. Texts include the poetry of Michelangelo, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, Daniel Ladinsky, Kahlil Gibran.

Other pieces will include “Choose Something Like a Star”, “How Lovely is Thy Dwelling Place”, “Beauty is Life”, “Shenandoah”, "Beautiful City” and “Lunar Lullaby”. Our featured pieces will be two moving and inspiring works by contemporary composer Dan Forrest — “The Sun Never Says” and "i thank You God for most this amazing day”.

“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before." (Leonard Bernstein)