St. Charles Singers — Candlelight Carols with Guitarist Goran Ivanovich

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The St. Charles Singers, led by founder and music director Jeffrey Hunt, will be joined by virtuoso Chicago guitarist Goran Ivanovic for its 41^st annual Candlelight Carols program.
 
The program, themed “Celebrating A World of Carols,” embraces 16 seasonal songs, most of them new to the St. Charles Singers repertoire, by composers and arrangers from the UK, continental Europe, and the US, including the greater Chicago area.
 
Audiences will hear seven works for choir and guitar, including world and local premieres.
 
“Guitar brings a beautifully delicate sound to the program,” choirmaster Hunt says. “It’s spare and elegant, almost like the harp, but exciting in its own way.”

Hunt says a holiday-concert challenge for choral directors is to keep programs fresh and engaging while also offering Christmas favorites that listeners cherish.
 
“Each year, I’m looking for sparkling new musical Christmas ornaments to surprise and delight our audiences,” Hunt says. “This year, many of these ornaments take the shape of the guitar.”
 
The mixed-voice chamber choir will present Candlelight Carols at 7:30 Saturday, December 6, and 3 p.m. Sunday, December 7, at Baker Memorial United Methodist Church, 307 Cedar Avenue, St. Charles. The December 7 concert is sold out.
 
Croatian-born guitarist Ivanovic has been hailed as an artist whose “stirring style incorporates jazz, traditional Balkan, flamenco and classical styles” (Chicago Sun-Times) and as “a multiculti wunderkind” (New City).
 
Ivanovic and the choir will give the world premiere of his recent composition, “Lina’s Heart,” dedicated to his baby daughter born earlier this year. Commissioned by the St. Charles Singers, the single-movement piece was arranged for choir by Mexican-born, Chicago-based singer, composer, and guitarist Christian Larumbe.
 
Hunt notes that “Lina’s Heart” “nestles naturally into the newborn-infant theme of Christmas.”
 
Audiences will hear songs by two Scandinavian composers. Hunt says he discovered Gustav Nordqvist’s “Jul, jul, strålande jul!” (Christmas, Christmas, Radiant Christmas!), “a beautiful, simple Swedish carol,” on a recording by the renowned Norwegian Soloists’ Choir and thought, “We need to do this!”
 
Ola Gjeilo’s “Det hev ei rose sprunge” (Spotless Rose) is a joyful, melodic Norwegian setting of a hymn of German origin.
 
The program includes French carols arranged by Stephen Paulus (“Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella”) and John Rutter (“Quittez, Pasteur”) and Javier Busto’s Basque Country “Gabon Miresgarriak” (The Gentle Voice of the Night).
 
Among songs new to the St. Charles Singers this season is “The Rune of Hospitality” by Alf Houkom, a Minnesota-born composer of Norwegian heritage. The text is from the inscription on a Gaelic rune he spotted in a book during Christmastime 1984. “This text struck me with the openness, with the possibility of Christ to come in any place,” he wrote of the song’s inspiration.
 
The program offers two works by American composer and guitarist Jeffrey Van: His evocative “Manger Dance,” with the guitar conjuring frolicking animals, and his arrangement of the Mexican Christmas lullaby “El Rorro” (The Baby).
 
Chicago-born Norman Luboff was the founder and conductor of the Grammy Award-winning Norman Luboff Choir, a household name during the 1950s and 60s. The St. Charles Singers will perform his arrangement of the Austrian carol “Still, Still, Still.”
 
Songs by British-born composers include Rockford, Illinois-based Donald Fraser’s gentle, melodic "This Christmastide (Jessye's Carol)," written for and dedicated to the soprano Jessye Norman. The St. Charles Singers will give the world premiere of Fraser’s new arrangement for choir and guitar, created at Hunt’s request. Fraser’s “A Christmas Carol,” written for the choir of England’s Westchester Cathedral, will receive its Chicago-area premiere.
 
Also from Great Britain: Ben Parry’s calming, comforting setting of the 17^th-century traditional song “Gentle Slumbers”; Hugo Cole’s “Deck the Hall,” based on a 16^th-century Welsh melody, and Andrew Carter’s “Two Spanish Carols,” including the tender “Spanish Lullaby” and exuberant, flamenco-style “Spanish Carol” celebrating Christ’s birth.
 
The concert concludes with a St. Charles Singers Christmas tradition: Choir members staged around three sides of the sanctuary for a surround-sound rendition of “Silent Night.” The famous song of hope and peace, originally in German, originated in post-war Austria in the early 1800s.
 
The first two verses of the version to be heard here were arranged by England’s David Willcocks, the third arranged for the St. Charles Singers by esteemed local choral director, composer, and educator Robert Boyd of Westmont, Illinois.
 
Holiday help for local charities
 
The choir is inviting concertgoers to bring prepaid gift cards, redeemable at local grocery and general merchandise stores, to be donated to charities assisting needy children and families.
 
The choir will forward gift cards collected at its St. Charles Candlelight Carols concerts to Big Hearts of Fox Valley and the Tri City Health Partnership, both based in St. Charles.

Tickets and information
 
Single-admission tickets to Candlelight Carols are $60 for adults, $50 for seniors, and $12 for students. Group discounts are available.
 
Tickets and information are available at stcharlessingers.com or by calling 630-513-5272. Tickets may also be purchased at the door on the day of the concert, depending on availability.