Hildegard Reanimated – Vision in Vision

Passionate and daring, The Pandora Consort crafts re-imagined programs dedicated to historically under-represented voices.

Friday, Dec. 12, 7:30 pm

Live in person and live streamed from the stunning Ripley Chapel, First Congregational Church  is pleased to present The Pandora Consort, an early music ensemble dedicated to reimagining classical music performance by integrating multimedia and interactive elements, and by sharing music and stories that uplift historically marginalized composers, particularly early female composers.

In Hildegard Reanimated, The Pandora Consort explores the mystical visions of Hildegard von Bingen through her illuminations and music. Taking inspiration from her life, Pandora weaves them together into a splendid concert program. Working with visual artist Cate Duckwall to bring these visions to life, this concert features music from Hildegard’s vast oeuvre accompanied by artistic animations of key illuminations, creating a multimedia experience. Featuring Kendra Comstock, Angie Tyler, Gina Marie Falk, voices and harmonium.

• When: Friday, December 12, 2025, at 7:30 pm
• Where: Ripley Chapel at 21 Church Street, Winchester, MA, 01890, Vine Street entrance.
• Tickets: $20 for adult (both live in person and live streamed); $5 for students with ID.
• Eventbrite: https://tr.ee/rpPandora

 About The Pandora Consort

The ensemble was founded by alumni of the Longy School of Music; Kendra Comstock, Angie Tyler, and Gina Marie Falk, and debuted their first program in the Summer of 2022, “Vox Feminae” with SoHIP Boston, showcasing compositions by female Baroque composers. Following their success with “Vox Feminae”, the Pandora Consort launched the annual Worlds Collide Series, a groundbreaking initiative that unites emerging musicians from diverse genres across Boston. The Pandora Consort has performed on the New York State Baroque and Pegasus Early Music Young Artist Series, SoHIP Boston Summer Concert Series, the Saint James World & Early Music Series (PA), King’s Chapel Concert Series (MA), Salon Avec Moi (NYC) and the BEMF Fringe Series. In the Summer of 2024, the Pandora Consort, was the ensemble-in-residence at the Portland Bach Experience, performing works of Hildegard and Bach throughout Southern Maine.

 What Others Have to Say

from The Boston Musical Intelligencer, Christopher Hodges, critic [2024]:

“…Ethereal! Spine-tingling! Mystifying!”

“At times, [Emmanuel Church’s Lindsay] Chapel’s great vaulted ceiling seemed too shallow to contain the exuberance of Hildegard’s celestial gestures, which the threesome so joyously produced.”

 “Together, their timbre amalgamated into a sweet, balanced chorus that, in the resonance, seemed to number into the dozens.”

“[Pandora] passionately realized the unique meaning of each song, both textually and musically…”

IMPORTANT NOTE: Ripley Chapel can be found at First Congregational Church, Winchester, 21 Church St. The entry is located on the Vine Street side of the church. Please use the accessible ramp entrance, and Ripley Chapel will be directly to your right as you enter the building.

Quick Links:

https://www.thepandoraconsort.com/

Friday, May 9, 2025, 7:30 p.m.

Live in-person and live streamed from the stunning Ripley Chapel at First Congregational Church, Winchester. Please join us for an inspired and dynamic evening of string quartet music with “Aryaloka String Quartet,” highlighting four of Boston’s finest string players: Beth Welty and Mark Latham, violins; Noralee Walker, viola; Sandi-Jo Malmon, cello.

The Aryaloka String Quartet will perform a concert of three quartets by Shostakovich, Max Mueller (the premiere of this work), and Ludwig van Beethoven. Superficially these works are quite different. However, they all explore and express our very human longings, joys, sorrows, and the desire for transcendence.

The Soviet composer Dimitri Shostakovich composed his fourth quartet in 1949, a time of great challenges for Soviet artists. Yet, while there is apparent discord in its music, it is, at the same time, full of a serene tranquility, lyricism as well as humor and fun.

The first quartet of the American composer Max Mueller was commissioned for the Aryaloka Quartet by Barbara Thomas. Max Mueller is a Los Angeles based film composer and orchestrator. He has scored several short and feature films.

At the end of his life Beethoven poured his creative energies into writing five string quartets. Opus 132 is the second of these. Richard Wagner said of these late quartets, “Let us wonder at the entirely new world…that meets us there.” JNW Sullivan writes: “In the last quartets…Beethoven is exploring new regions of consciousness. When we come to the last quartets we find a remote spiritual content. We here become aware not only of new syntheses of spiritual elements, but of radically new elements.”

Please join us in traversing these diverse musical landscapes of the human spirit.

Tickets are $20 General Admission / $5 students In Person or Live Streamed
Purchase Tickets Here

For more information about the concert, please contact Jane Ring Frank at 857-919-0983 or jane@fcc-winchester.org.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Ripley Chapel can be found at First Congregational Church, Winchester, 21 Church St. The entry is located on the Vine Street side of the church. Please use the accessible ramp entrance, and Ripley Chapel will be directly to your right as you enter the building.

Live in-person and live streamed from the stunning Ripley Chapel at First Congregational Church, Winchester. Please join us for a genre-bending sound tempered with the grooves of Motown, Memphis, the Gulf Coast of Texas, and New Orleans – in essence, the Willie J. Laws Band.

The Band is one of the most notable Blues acts with a modern funky style that’s uniquely its own. The band’s sound includes deep Texas roots music, add some funk, and jazz influenced bass patterns, and the influence of various Afro-Caribbean drum beats. This isn’t strictly Blues, much of it is original music with its own sound and tempo. You will enter the Willie J. Laws Band musical train, covering a varied terrain with its assorted musical sounds. It’s an exciting, fast-moving train, and you will most definitely enjoy the ride!

Willie J. Laws: a Texas guitar “gun slinger,” vocalist, and song writer following in the footsteps of T-Bone Walker, Lightning Hopkins, Albert King and many others. This music is the kind of real Texas soul, all mixed up with classic R&B, country, blues/funk that grows from the Texas soil. Willie has performed nationally and internationally, including two tours of Russia at the invite of the US Consulate in St Petersburg.

Once the house band at The House of Blues/Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas and Margaritaville in New Orleans. Winners of the Mass Blues Society Challenge 2011, Semi-finalists at the International Blues Competition 2012 and Beale St Kings Awards. A two time nominee for New England Music Award – Best Blues Act 2015 and 2016, 2015 Nominee for Boston Music Award – Best Blues Act 2015. Come see what many are calling the “Real Deal”.

Tickets are $20, General Admission (live or live streamed); $5 for students.

Tickets are sold on Eventbrite

For more information about the concert, please visit https://fcc-winchester.com/ or Jane Ring Frank, Minister of Music and Worship Arts at 857-919-0983 or jane@fcc-winchester.org.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Ripley Chapel can be found at First Congregational Church, Winchester, 21 Church St. The entry to the building is located on the Vine Street side of the church. Please use the accessible ramp entrance, and Ripley Chapel will be directly to your right as you enter the building.

“Contemporaneous Kaleidoscope: Music of our time,”

LIVE and LIVE STREAMED: FRIDAY, January 19, 2024, 7:30 p.m.

Live in-person and live streamed from the stunning Ripley Chapel at First Congregational Church. Please join us for a dynamic and virtuosic evening of chamber music featuring Kaleidoscope Chamber Music Ensemble, an astonishing collective featuring seven of Boston’s most highly regarded instrumentalists.

Formed in 1996 by musicians with a wealth of chamber music experience, Kaleidoscope committed itself from the beginning to presenting a wide musical repertory, diverse in style, period, and instruments. As the name implies, the group’s combination and number of instruments is constantly changing, even within a single concert. Chamber works with as few as two players may be programmed with larger works of up to six or more performers which include string players, wind players and a pianist. Kaleidoscope’s broad repertoire ranges from works from the Baroque era to the most recent 21st century compositions.

“…kaleidoscopic in shading and expressive nuance.”, Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Contemporaneous Kaleidoscope” features: Jill Dreeben, flute; Charlyn, Bethell, oboe; Tracy McGinnis, bassoon; Beth Welty, violin; Dani Rimoni, viola; Sandi-Jo Malmon, cello; Elizabeth Skavish, piano.

Concert Program:

• “Roots II” by David Baker (1931-2016), 5-movement suite commissioned by the Beaux Arts Trio, 1992.
• “American Canvas” by Jennifer Higdon (1962 -), 3-movement piece, 2015, each movement a sonic and harmonic ode to Georgia O’Keefe, Jackson Pollock, Andrew Wyeth, respectively.
• “Peace” for violin and piano by Jessie Montgomery (1981 – ), pensive and melancholy yet energetic, written in response to the initial quarantine orders from the COVID-19 pandemic.
• “Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano” by Andre Previn (1929-2019), 3-movement work, with a nod to Poulenc, full of energy, jazz rhythms, and sweeping harmonies.
• “Loop” by Carlos Simon (1986 -), for string trio, a very different, deeply felt response to the never-ending “loop” of quarantine from COVID-19.

Tickets are $20 (in-person or live stream):

For more information about the concert, please visit https://fcc-winchester.com/ or contact Jane Ring Frank, Minister of Worship and the Arts at 857-919-0983 or at jringfrank@gmail.com.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Ripley Chapel can be found at First Congregational Church, Winchester, 21 Church St. The entry is located on the Vine Street side of the church. Please use the accessible ramp entrance, and Ripley Chapel will be directly to your right as you enter the building.

Aryaloka String Quartet honors Black historical and contemporary composers.

Concert tickets are $20 – both live and live-streamed. To purchase tickets: bit.ly/RPASQ23

Live in-person and live streamed from the stunning Ripley Chapel at First Congregational Church, Winchester. Please join us for an inventive and dynamic evening of string quartet music with “Aryaloka String Quartet,” highlighting four of Boston’s finest string players.

The Aryaloka String Quartet of Boston was formed in the mid-2000’s by long-time colleagues and friends Beth Welty and Mark Latham, violins; Noralee Walker, viola and Sandi-Jo Malmon, cello. Aryaloka is a Sanskrit word which is roughly understood as “in the presence of the noble ones.” Thus playing the music of the great composers, from Haydn to the present, the quartet and the audience are indeed “in the presence of the noble ones.” They are dedicated to bringing the communal experience of chamber music to the wider world, in both smaller, unexpected venues as well as traditional concert halls. They especially enjoy crafting programs of classic string quartet literature while championing lesser known, neglected, or forgotten composers.

The program itself is an exciting and compelling one. It honors historical and contemporary Black composers, including

• Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875- 1912), “Fantasiestücke” for String Quartet Op.5
• Florence Price (1887-1953), “String Quartet in G Major” (1929)
• Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932- 2004), “String Quartet no. 1, Calvary”
• Jessie Montgomery (born 1981), “Strum”

From Dinah Bodkin, The Boston Musical Intelligencer, 2018:

The members of the Aryaloka…reveled in the challenges they confronted, delivering a conversation in which the demands of the music dictated which instrument was the driving force at any given instant, or whether the instantaneous kinetic energy propelled the entire ensemble.

Listen to some samples:

Concert tickets are $20 – both live and live-streamed. To purchase tickets: bit.ly/RPASQ23

For more information, please visit www.fcc-winchester.org or contact Sarah Marino at 781-729-9180 or at first.congregational@verizon.net.

A Special concert in celebration of the renovation of Ripley Chapel.

*****SOLD OUT*****

Please join us for a dynamic and inspiring evening that celebrates the 45th anniversary of Cris Williamson’s ground-breaking and critically acclaimed album, “The Changer and the Changed.”

Decades before indie labels were the norm, and years before women had any real access to the industry, Cris Williamson was busy changing the face of popular music. In 1975, the twenty-something recorded “The Changer And The Changed,” for Olivia Records, the first woman-owned woman-focused record company. Her music and voice quickly became the soundtrack of a movement and was the cornerstone of what would become known as “women’s music,” music created, performed, and marketed specifically to women. Today, that recording, “The Changer and the Changed,” remains one of the best-selling independent releases of all time.

Says Bonnie Raitt, “The first time I heard Cris’ music, it was like hearing honey dripped on a cello… Cris has been a whole lot of women’s heroes — including mine.” Williamson was honored in 2018 at the Americana Music Awards with a Lifetime Achievement Award for the work done in support of women in the music business, particularly the support of Lesbian artists in the early 70’s and beyond.

Tickets are $18 General Admission and available at Brown Paper Tickets:

https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/4521247

Entry to Ripley Chapel is found at 21 Church Street, Winchester, Vine Street accessible entrance. For more information about the concert, please visit www.fcc-winchester.org or contact Jane Ring Frank, Minister of Music and Worship Arts at 857-919-0983 or at jringfrank@comcast.net.

Read More about Ripley Chapel Arts & Spirituality