William Grant Still (1895-1978)
Gazette
By Jim Ruggirello
Music Critic
Music Critic
December 22, 2017
There are all kinds of Christmas concerts.
And the other evening at Grace First Presbyterian Church, Long Beach Chorale once again served up their specialty, a “Festival of Carols” that acknowledged tradition while exploring interesting corners of the contemporary repertoire.
Artistic director Eliza Rubenstein has long been a champion of new music, and she has a particular gift for structuring a program of new and interesting compositions and arrangements that don’t scare anyone off. If this program was, to quote an introductory speaker, “mostly things you’ve never heard before,” the audience still came away with that warm fuzzy Christmas feeling.
William Grant Still, the other big name on the program, was a jazz arranger as well as a composer, and it showed in the sweet, simple “Glad Christmas Bells” as well as the spiritual-like “Shout! Shout! Tell the Story,” from his “Christmas in the Western World.”
