After two years of the pandemic, we meet again, live! Real musicians with a real audience and great music, all in the same location. The concert features some of the concert series’ musicians and includes performances by pianists Craig Combs and John Thomas, Broadway concert singers Trish LaRose, Pamela Murray, Carolyn Rogers, saxophonist Ken Field, flautist Eric Maul, clarinetist Mónika Veress, and Frederick Jodry on the historic 1850 Holbrook tracker organ. Let the music begin… again!

Brilliant entertainers from Cape Cod and beyond come together for a special presentation of our concert series’ signature event: a Broadway extravaganza! The curtain rises on our weekly 2022 concert season with a dozen performers offering songs with pizzazz and elegance from musicals throughout the decades.

The legendary “Silk Road” trade route is known in history for the seemingly endless variety of goods and commerce that moved from Europe to Asia and back again from the second to the 15th centuries. But the politics, religions and cultures of societies and nations also traveled along the 4,000 mile network of roads and waters. They mingled, merged and blended into combined and new forms of thought and culture… especially music. Four musicians known for their innovation in music repertoire and instrument performance gather to take a journey through music old and new from France, Hungary, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, China and Japan. They present a music without borders tour from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a soundscape of aural treasures that will fill the concert hall and enrich the spirit.

“A Symphony of Crickets” is a 75-minute music and spoken word performance based on the poetry of award-winning African American writer & musician Charles Coe. Mr. Coe reads selected works with interludes performed by the musicians. With a wide ranging song list inspired by the text of the poems, the music traverses jazz, funk, rhythm & blues, delta blues, and even classical styles, strung together in a seamless sequence outlining in words and tones the breadth of the American musical experience. Music by Charles Coe, J.S. Bach, James Brown, Sam Cooke, George Gershwin, Son House, Scott Joplin, John Lennon, Charles Mingus, Paul McCartney, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Ned Washington, Victor Young & more.

Since 1994, this award-winning group of a cappella male collegiate singers from all parts of the United States has presented thousands of concerts during the summer season on Cape Cod and New England. They have been a favorite of the Great Music on Sundays @5 audiences for many years. The pandemic required them to perform mostly online, and their social media fanbase increased to more than 700,000. They garnered acclaim from Alicia Keys, Pentatonix and Glamour Magazine along the way. It is a delight to present this special event to our audience again in the acoustically dynamic UU sanctuary. Come and experience this charming, talented and fun group and their diverse repertoire of dazzling and moving music arranged by current and former members.

Stephen Sondheim’s spirit lives on. He remains alive in the hearts of every lover of Broadway musicals and is considered the greatest composer of all time in this genre. Our perennial homage to Mr. Sondheim is one of the concert series’ most popular events and the most requested concert by our audiences. This year our epic Sondheim presentation takes its inspiration from Provincetown’s Carnival theme “Monsters, Myths & Legends”. An almost perfect fit. This is the best Broadway review concert of Provincetown’s diverse musical season. 

Embark on a musical tour of fascinating and diverse genres of folklore, composition, and modern styles that traverse the mountains, plains and sea of one of the most complicated countries in the European Union. John Thomas has studied and performed music of Bulgaria in the country where it was created. The concert includes music by the greatest and most revered of the classical Bulgarian composers, Pancho Vladigerov; compositions by two icons of the era, Dimitar Nenov and Lyubomir Pipkov; Milcho Leviev, the internationally known pioneer of Bulgarian “music without borders” mixing traditional themes with American jazz and boogie woogie; Nedyalko Nedyalkov, a soulful composer and master of the flute-like kaval; a rare nostalgic tango from the café era of early 20^th century Bulgarian society; and composed improvisations by John Thomas of traditional melodies from some of Bulgaria’s musical regions: Dobrudzha, Macedonia, Pleven (Milkovitsa), Rhodope (Garnati), Sandanski, and Thrace.

Aaron Larget-Caplan returns to Provincetown for a performance of solos and chamber works Aaron and Frederick Jodry explore the music of Bach with solo and duo compositions for guitar, harpsichord, and organ. New solos by Aaron for guitar from his 2022 album ‘honey cadence’ features pianist John Thomas as special guest. Aaron is a classical guitarist who has premiered over 85 compositions and directs and curates the New Lullaby Project, including two volumes of an anthology of scores published in partnership with the American Composers Alliance. His arrangements and recording of the music of John Cage, issued by Edition Peters and Stone Records and the first to be sanctioned by the estate, have received international accolades. He has seven solo discs, including his first album of his own compositions ‘honey cadence’. An album featuring his arrangements of Bach will be issued this year.

Provincetown’s newest chamber music ensemble, Through the Red Door, presents a fabulous program of fantastically French chamber music. Highlights of the program include Poulenc’s Flute Sonata, a masterwork of chamber music for flute dedicated to the memory of the great American patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and a reading of Saint-Saëns’ Tarantella op. 5, a flurry of swirling sound and virtuosity. Juxtaposed against these popular favorites, the musicians explore chamber music’s role in theater through the music of Ibert and Milhaud, both of whom morphed incidental theater music into beautiful chamber music.  Join us for this French fantasy hour! 

A fitting finale to our first live music season since 2019, we conclude with another Broadway music spectacle with a dozen singers who love to perform songs from musicals famous and obscure. One big finale after another… musical fireworks on Broadway!