Alumni and Friends Are Invited to Attend

“This is a great opportunity for our students and a great honor to perform in such a magnificent structure,” remarked Dr. Larry Parsons, director of the West Virginia Wesleyan College Concert Chorale. What exactly is Dr. Parsons talking about? The Concert Chorale will start their annual March spring tour in grand fashion this year, performing in the new 1,880-seat Maier Foundation Performance Hall at the Clay Center for the Arts & Sciences in Charleston, West Virginia.

The Concert Chorale will perform with the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra and Symphony Chorus on consecutive nights at the Clay Center on March 5 and 6 at 8 p.m. The featured piece on the program will be Brahms Requiem. “This is a wonderful occasion for the Concert Chorale,” said Dr. Parsons. “The Brahms Requiem is the type of work that is very difficult to perform here, at the College. It takes a large orchestra and actually works a little better with a combination of young and older voices. So performing at the Clay Center is an ideal situation for the Concert Chorale.”

The Requiem, which is the largest single work by Brahms, represents an outstanding flowering of his musical genius. Composed between 1865 and 1868, the Requiem explores the mortality and mystery of the resurrection, the bliss of those who 'dwell in the house of the Lord' and culminates in the reunion of the living with the dead.

Dr. Parsons and the Concert Chorale were scheduled to perform last year in the Clay Center, but when the venue wasn’t completed on time, the performance was postponed until March 2004. The Alumni Relations Office has planned a stand-up reception in the Clay Center Founders’ Lounge prior to the Saturday, March 6th performance between 6:30-8 p.m. “What a wonderful opportunity this will be to join Wesleyan friends and hear an outstanding performance,” remarked Tim Channell, Director of Alumni Relations. “Wesleyan is very fortunate to have such talented student musicians and we applaud their success.”

The 240,000-square foot Clay Center for the Arts & Sciences opened on July 12, 2003, and houses the performing arts, visual arts and the sciences under one roof - one of the few centers of its kind in the country. The facility is home to both the Avampato Discovery Museum and the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra. It is one of the most ambitious economic, cultural and educational undertakings in the history of West Virginia. “It is such a gorgeous facility,” commented Dr. Parsons about the Clay Center. “Our past shows in Charleston were held in the Municipal Auditorium but the acoustics in the Auditorium are not very good. To be in a 1,800+-seat theater with such exceptional acoustics and sight lines is wonderful.

“Another benefit of the Clay Center,” Parsons continued, “is that it is surrounded by so many wonderful churches that we have strong ties with such as St. Marks, Christ United Methodist, and St. Johns Episcopal, just to name a few. We have several alumni and students from this area that attend many of these churches. For that reason, we try to perform in Charleston with a degree of regularity.”

According to Dr. Parsons, who is in his 36th year as director of the Concert Chorale, “We are honored to be performing in the Clay Center with the West Virginia Symphony,” he exclaimed.

While the Clay Center is a dream come true for many West Virginians in the Kanawha Valley, Wesleyan is hoping to have its own dream for a new modern theatre realized in the near future with the new Virginia Thomas Law Center for the Performing Arts. The center will host many of Wesleyan’s excellent musical and theatrical programs, Arts Alive series and community theatre. An aggressive community fundraising campaign for the center is helping to add new support to the needed $7 million project.

“We hope to see a good Wesleyan crowd in Charleston on March 6th,” said Channell. “It should be a not-to-be-missed performance!”