Groups gives concert before theater renovation

• By ROBIN MILLER
• Arts writer
• Published: Apr 27, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

This will be the LSU School of Music’s last Union Theater performance for at least year. After this, audiences will have to go to First Baptist Church of Baton Rouge, the Louisiana School for the Deaf and the Reilly Theatre on campus for big events and concerts.

“The LSU Union Theater is undergoing renovation after this,” Sara Lynn Baird said. “They’re predicting it will take a year before the project is complete.”

And what better way to end the School of Music’s run in the old version of the theater than with not one, but three musical groups onstage?

Baird is the School of Music’s acting dean. She’s also conductor of the Schola Cantorum, a mixed choir which will join the LSU Symphony Orchestra and A Cappella Choir in performing Johannes Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem Tuesday, April 29. The concert begins at 8 p.m.

Most music fans know this piece by its nickname — the Brahms Requiem. And though Baird is leader of one of the groups, she won’t be conducting during the concert. Kenneth Fulton will step into that role.

Fulton is a professor of choral students at LSU, but that title seems to be an understatement when looking at his accomplishments. Fulton has been named one of LSU’s Distinguished Professors and is chorusmaster for the LSU Symphony Chorus. He’s also artistic director and conductor for the Linz International Choral Festival in Linz, Austria, and is editor for the Kenneth Fulton Choral Series published by Alliance Music Corporation.

His credits are almost too many to list. Baird sums them up with a simple statement.

“He’s highly regarded around the world as a choral conductor, and he’s done so much for the choral program at LSU,” she said.

And he’ll coordinate this concert, which also features two soloists, soprano Jennifer Juilfs and baritone Terrance Brown.

Those who attended the School of Music’s production of the opera La Traviata, also performed on the LSU Union Theater stage, will remember Brown in the role of Georgio.

He and Juilfs will join the orchestra and choral groups in the Requiem in the second half of the concert. The first half belongs to the orchestra with conductor Julian Shew directing Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B Minor.

This piece has a nickname, too, known simply as Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony.

But it’s Brahms Requiem that will grab the spotlight, a piece, Baird says, that is her favorite choral and orchestra masterwork.