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Christina and I attended A Concert of New Music for Women’s Voices given by the Adesso Choral Society on May 1, 2011 at the G & B Cultural Community Center in Wilton, CT.  It was organized and conducted by composer/ flutist / conductor Meg Collins Stoop.

Meg is on a mission.  Meg Collins Stoop is a highly trained musician who studied solo voice with Christina for a season, appearing in two of our concerts. Meg’s mission is to not only bring new choral music to light but to encourage its creation.  She formed Adesso in 2001,  telling us at the beginning of the concert that the word means now in Italian. and that the main intention of the group is to learn and perform contemporary music by living composers.

She seeks out composers by announcing nationwide and even internationally the group’s interest in perusing new scores.  In this event she assembled a concert in cooperation with the Long Island Composers Alliance  and Connecticut Composers Inc.  Most of the music performed was by composers local to Connecticut and Long Island (at least five of them were there in attendance) and 14 works were presented on the program. The Adesso Choral Society right now consists of nine women who commit themselves to a regular schedule of weekly rehearsals and willingly take on some quite challenging music under Meg’s direction. Challenging doesn’t mean that the music isn’t accessible to the ear.  Singing a cappella (without piano accompaniment) was clearly mastered in five of the works. Local composer Eugenie R. Rocherolle’s Alleluia was quite chromatic and well beyond the scope of any church choir that I ever encountered.  Ashes of Life by Patricia W. King, ( First Prize winner of the Long island Arts Council Third International Musical Composition Contest) caught my attention because of the way she set the piano accompaniment generally below that of the all female vocal ensemble giving it a distinct role of its own that wasn’t simply there to keep the ensemble on pitch. Conductor Meg gave the vocal ensemble a rest twice by picking up her flute.   After the first five choral works she played a new flute solo by local composer Stephen Becroft entitled Breezes.  He studies composition with me on occasion and I take credit for having introduced him to the tradition of composing for solo instruments, a practice that has become synonymous with 20th century music ever since Debussy and Varese led the way.  He obviously made a study of this literature and made use of the full range and expressive capacity of the flute.  

Later in the program Meg Stoop played a work of her own, Lonesome Flute: Fantasy on a Native American Theme.  She explained the source of inspiration that underpinned this work, demonstrating the distinctive character of Native American flute playing. Every work on the program had substance and was well crafted.  Although I’d love to focus attention on the works and their composers I especially want to commend the choral ensemble -- Nancy Brant, Jeannette LaForte, Catherine Sementini, Susan S. Fulljames, Beth Mistriel, Anashya Srinivasan, Doris Kaye, Jean Reed, and Meg’s daughter Sophia Stoop, as well as the groups highly accomplished pianist Leslie C. Smith.  It is a labor of love and a real gift to both our local community and the development of new vocal literature in our time. Click here for more information about Adesso, Meg Collins Stoop, Connecticut Composers, Inc., and the Long Island Composers Alliance.
Howard Rovics