Date and Time: Friday, July 11, 2025, 7 PM. Inside concert.
Grounds open at 6:30. Optional picnic on the green. Bring a chair or blanket if desired.

Location: Island Arts Center, 1127 US Rt 2, North Hero, VT 05474
Tickets: $25 online and at the door, $20 at local outlets.
 

A concert of unaccompanied choral music performed by the outstanding Montpelier-based chamber chorus Counterpoint, directed by Nathaniel Lew.

As the success of HBO’s “The Gilded Age” shows, the final decades of the 19th century in America continue to fascinate the public. The age of the robber barons was also the peak of the middle-class parlor piano and vaudeville, and saw a flowering of tragic ballads, naive love lyrics, theater songs, and pictures of city life, as well as the first stirrings of Tin Pan Alley.

The concert is a tour of this repertory, in sparking a cappella arrangements that show off what critics have praised as the Counterpoint ensemble’s “clarity, skill” and “sophisticated musical expressiveness.”

The program ranges from the evergreen songs of Stephen Foster (“Beautiful Dreamer”) to Bowery waltzes (“The Sidewalks of New York”), and from sentimental classics like “Home Sweet Home” to comic numbers such as “You’ll Have to Put a Nightie on Aphrodite.”

Counterpoint was founded in 2000 by legendary Vermont choral conductor and arranger Robert De Cormier. The ensemble performs throughout Vermont and surrounding regions, and has released seven CDs with Albany Records and five more independently.