Chanticleer to perform March 5

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The Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble Chanticleer will perform at 4 p.m. March 5 at St. Paul’s by-the-Sea Episcopal Church, 465 12th Ave. N., Jacksonville Beach. The doors open at 3:15 p.m. Admission is free.

A reception will follow. The visual artist for this event is Vanessa Withun.

The performance is part of the Beaches Fine Arts Series.

Chanticleer has appeared in the series five times, beginning in 2004. In 2008, elementary school students painted canvases while listening to their recordings. The canvases were pieced together as quilts and hung in Jacoby Hall during their performance.

Chanticleer has been hailed as “the world’s reigning male chorus” by The New Yorker and is known around the world as “an orchestra of voices” for its wide-ranging repertoire and dazzling virtuosity.

Founded in San Francisco in 1978 by singer and musicologist Louis Botto, Chanticleer quickly took its place as one of the most prolific recording and touring ensembles in the world, selling over one million recordings and performing thousands of live concerts to audiences around the world.

Chanticleer’s repertoire is rooted in the renaissance and has continued to expand to include a wide range of classical, gospel, jazz, popular music and a deep commitment to the commissioning of new compositions and arrangements. The ensemble has committed much of its vast recording catalogue to these commissions, garnering Grammy Awards for its recording of Sir John Tavener’s “Lamentations & Praises” and the ambitious collection of commissioned works titled “Colors of Love.”

Chanticleer is the recipient of the Dale Warland/Chorus America Commissioning Award and the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for Adventurous Programming, and its music director emeritus, Joseph H. Jennings, received the Brazeal Wayne Dennard Award for his contribution to the African-American choral tradition during his tenure with Chanticleer. 

Named for the “clear-singing” rooster in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” Chanticleer continues to maintain ambitious programming in its hometown of San Francisco, including a large education and outreach program that recently reached more than 8,000 people, and an annual concert series that includes its legendary holiday tradition “A Chanticleer Christmas.”

Vanessa Withun is a contemporary representational artist of Puerto Rican and Dominican heritage originally from Bronx, New York.  Coming from an artistic family, she was always drawn to the arts. After serving in the military and moving to the Southeast, she developed an interest in landscapes and nature. She was inspired by the wetlands and marshes that surrounded the coastal area and decided to pursue a degree in environmental science.  Although her work is representational, she heavily relies on an intuitive process, which gives her paintings a sentimental and romantic quality. Her style is a combination of Expressionism and Realism, and she believes that both forms of art are necessary in order to achieve an aesthetic balance. She enjoys painting from life and using color and heavy textures to show the intricacies of form and the behavior of light. Although she focuses on coastal landscapes, she enjoys painting portraits and still life, as well. Her work has been exhibited across the United States including with Oil Painters of America. She is also a recent recipient of the Art Ventures Grant in Jacksonville.