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The Westminster Choir will bring its music to Florida in January, performing a program entitled "The Cloud-Capped Towers: Poetry and Choral Artistry." 

Under the direction of Maestro Joe Miller, the concert will create a poetic soundscape through settings of texts by classic and contemporary poets.  The program will feature Three Shakespeare Songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams, which includes “The Cloud-Capp’d Towers,” for which the concert is named.  The choir will also perform Rückert Lieder, Johannes Brahms’ and Gustav Mahler’s settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert, and James MacMillan’s Strathclyde Motets.  Other composers represented in the program are J.S. Bach and Georgy Sviridov.

A highlight of the concert will be To A Locomotive in Winter, Jaakko Mäntyjärvi’s dynamic setting of Walt Whitman’s poem with the same title.  The work was commissioned by Westminster Choir College for the Westminster Choir’s tour.  Mäntyjärvi has written about the poem and his composition, “In this poem, an early example of machine romanticism, Walt Whitman conjures up a realistic yet idealized image of a technological  advancement which within his lifetime had transformed the continent of North America.  The overall impression in my mind of the shape of the poem and of the piece was not that the train starts and accelerates, but rather that the train is already in motion and, if anything, is slowing down – or perhaps this is to be understood as the Doppler shift in the sound of a moving object passing by.”

The ensemble will also present workshops at several leading high schools and colleges in the cities where they'll perform.

Westminster and Rider alumni are invited to receptions before most performances. 

Download alumni brochure.



to Joe Miller's podcast about the Westminster Choir's tour program.

Download concert program.