The Poné Ensemble for New Music will present its spring 2022 concert on Saturday, May 21, 12 noon at the Old Dutch Church in Kingston as part of the church’s Fine Arts Music Series. The program will feature two pieces that we have been planning to perform since before the pandemic – Ravel’s Chansons Madecasses (Madagascan Songs) and Holy Orders: Shaker Dances for violin, cello, oboe and piano by Leanna Primiani – plus works by Malcolm Arnold, Peter Schickele, and the Ensemble’s own Shirley Hoffman Warren. We will also honor the memory of Carol Roper, who served on our board for many years and who died in 2020.

Guest mezzo-soprano Maria Bedo-Calhoun will join the Poné Ensemble to perform “Chansons Madecasses” (Songs of Madagascar) composed by Maurice Ravel and premiered in 1926. The work is a collection of three art songs for voice, flute, cello and piano set to poetry by Évariste de Parny (1753-1814).

Holy Orders: Shaker Dances for violin, cello, oboe and piano was composed by Leanna Primiani (b. 1978). Primiani is an exciting young composer and conductor from California. She is the first woman to receive a Ford Foundation Conducting Talent Grant and has been an Aspen Music Festival Fellow and USC Leonard Bernstein Music Scholar.

The music of Shirley Hoffman Warren, a New Paltz native and Poné Ensemble board member, is lyrical and tonal with a slightly off-balance feel. Warren’s two pieces to be performed in this program include Acadia for oboe, viola and piano, and Birthday Suite for flute and piano, composed in honor of former Poné Ensemble board president, Sally Vasse.

Peter Schickele lives in the Hudson Valley and is known for his longtime comic radio personality, PDQ Bach. Malcolm Arnold was a 20th-century British composer who worked in many styles and genres. He is perhaps best known for his film scores, including The Bridge over the River Kwai (1957), for which he won an Oscar.