Saturday, February 15th, join us for our second annual Black History Month performance!

After the success of last year’s collaboration with the Lincoln University Choir, we come together again to perform a wider diversity of works by black composers to honor and celebrate Black History Month.

Many of these performances will be regional premieres. The concert’s first half will feature three selections performed by the Lincoln University Choir alone (giving our Reading audience a chance to enjoy their excellent work!). Vox Philia will then join with them to perform works by Robert Fryson, Brian Tate and Jake Runestad’s incredible setting of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Commissioned by Craig Hella Johnson and the Cincinnati Vocal Arts Ensemble, Runestad’s setting is virtuosic and more difficult than anything we performed together last year.

Our second regional premiere takes us back to the composer we featured in last year’s concert, William Grant Still. Together we will perform his “Three Rhythmic Spirituals,” works which all hardly ever performed today. The final work in the set, “Hard Times,” will feature a young freshmen soloist from the Lincoln University choir, accompanied by Berks Sinfonietta.

The second half of the program features Sowande’s “African Suite,” Walker’s “Lyric for Strings,” Grant Still’s “Danzas de Panama,” and Jessica Montgomery’s “Source Code,” all performed by Berks Sinfonietta. To the best of our knowledge, except for Grant Still, none of these composers has been performed in Reading before, and we are especially happy to be presenting a work by a living black woman composer.

In short, our Black History Month concert seeks to honor, educate, enrich and celebrate.

We will be performing a second concert the following day at Oxford Presbyterian Church in Oxford, PA.