Cabaret
February 28th and March 1st, 2025
UUCB's annual Cabaret will be held on the evenings of February 28th and March 1st. This year's event will feature our tenor soloist Shaun Doyle, who has performed Cabarets at MusicalFare and St. Joseph's school to much acclaim. This is a fun night out with food, drink, and entertainment for the whole community!
Music Weekend
May 9th, 2025
Join the UUCB Choir for a special Mothers' Day Music Weekend, featuring the premiere of new choral works by beloved local jazz (and more!) musician Alex McArthur. The program will be entitled "Mother - honoring the feminine divine and mother earth." and will explore themes of togetherness and unity. There will be two events - a concert on the evening of Friday 5/9 featuring Alex and her band alongside the choir - as well as a service featuring the choir only on Sunday 5/11. Tickets to the concert are available here!
Past Music Weekends
Well-Mannered Frivolity
Sunday, November 17th was our Music Sunday, entitled “Well-Mannered Frivolity” - not only a reference to the recently departed Maggie Smith’s role in the Harry Potter films, but also a wonderful way to sum up the choir’s fall focus of finding joy and ease in their time together. The service featured the stunning music of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Three Shakespeare Songs and Benjamin Britten’s Choral Dances from Gloriana – two colorful and playful sets of a capella choral pieces with Elizabethan-era references and dreamlike imagery. For the sermon, Music Director Jessie Downs spoke about the importance of finding time in our lives not only for rest and recovery but escape into fantasy and dreaming. Through seemingly “frivolous” indulgence, we can nourish our inner worlds and return to our collective reality more energized and awake.
Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem
UUCB’s Spring Music Weekend 2024 featured a presentation of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem on Sunday, April 7th at 10:30am. Eastman DMA organist Augustine Sobeng will accompany our choir on Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, a meditative half-hour of music that explores the impact of grief. For this special service, our choir will also be joined by 5 guest vocal artists from the Sotto Voce collective – altos Jamie Gangemi and Erin Alexander, tenors Tyler Huk and Zane Merritt, and baritone Ky Ver Hoef. In addition to our group’s lush ensemble sound, audiences will also be treated to solos by our Soprano Soloist Taryn Goehrig and guest baritone Ky Ver Hoef.
Prayers for Peace
The UUCB’s MUUsic 2023 Fall Weekend (November 17th to the 19th) performances of “Prayers for Peace” presented a stirring trio of music to both celebrate Ukrainian culture and the healing power of cross-cultural music sung together.
The UUCB Choir collaborated with the University at Buffalo (UB) Choir, Mriya Ukrainian Women’s Choir, and St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church Choir to produce two evening concerts and a morning service featuring powerful reflective music in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. These events showcased music by a variety of Ukrainian choral composers and included spoken information on the music’s origins and meanings in both English and Ukrainian. The UUCB service on Sunday included musical excerpts from the two previous evening events, and information about the history and lived experience of the war in Ukraine, as well as how we in the U.S. can help.
Dido & Aeneas
On May 5th 2023 the UUCB Choir, staff, and guest musicians from around the country presented Henry Purcell’s baroque opera Dido and Aeneas for our first ever MUUsic Weekend.
This expansion of our traditional Music Sundays began with a full operatic performance on Friday, May 5th at 7:30pm (with pre-show talk at 7pm) and was followed by a presentation of choral excerpts from the opera on Sunday May 7th at our usual service time. The Friday evening performance was open to the public on a pay-what-you-will basis. If you missed it, you can now watch a recording of the event on our YouTube channel (link to the left).
Dido and Aeneas tells the story of Dido, Queen of Carthage, as first told in Virgil’s epic The Aeneid. The widowed and exiled queen is master of her own domain until the widowed and exiled hero Aeneas arrives on her queendom’s shores. Through the meddling of the gods, the two rulers’ fates are bound together, only to then be forced violently apart with horrific consequences for Dido. The opera is known for its tragic ending, but this mythic tale is also full of humor and insight into what it means to be human. Its hour-long duration is crammed full of stunning singing from both the soloists and Greek-style chorus. Our production also featured period string and keyboard instruments as would have been used in the opera’s original productions in the 1680s.
