A Prairie Home Companion: February 5, 2005

Special Guests
Saturday, February 5, 2005

Philip Brunelle and VocalEssence Ensemble Singers

They were founded by Philip Brunelle in 1969 as an arts outreach program of Plymouth Congregational Church, and were off to a flying start when Aaron Copland came to conduct them that first season; the first time he had ever been asked to conduct his choral music. The Ensemble Singers are a more portable 32-voice part of the 120-voice VocalEssence Chorus. The name was changed from Plymouth Music Series in 2002 but the mission remains the same, which is to bring excellence and innovation to its audiences by performing both new and important historical choral music. Now in their 36th season, they have delivered the first performances of more than a hundred original works. In June of 1999 the group hosted the Chorus America Conference and in 2002 hosted the World Symposium on Choral Music. They have won too many awards to list; suffice to say they have earned an international reputation at the highest level. Their latest recording is Over the River and Through the Woods featuring Garrison Keillor and The Hopeful Gospel Quartet recorded at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis.

Prudence Johnson

Prudence Johnson's 25 year career in music has taken her from nightclubs and honky-tonks to Carnegie Hall, from the theater stage to the Silver Screen (Robert Redford's A River Runs Through It), from the Midwest to the Middle East. Her 10 album releases include Little Dreamer, a collection of international lullabies, Moon Country, which features the music of Hoagy Carmichael, and S'Gershwin, a collaboration with pianist Dan Chouinard. She recently collaborated with four Minnesota composers to create A Girl Named Vincent, a presentation of the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay set to music, to be released on CD this year. She is a 2001 recipient of the McKnight Artists Fellowship for Performing Musicians and enjoys a steady schedule of concert appearances across the country.

John Niemann

He got started in music at the right time and place, and for the right reasons; he was in high school and there were girls there. He began with Leo Fender's gift to the world, the electric bass, and started a rock and roll band. In college he discovered acoustic music on the West Bank in Minneapolis and learned the guitar, fiddle and mandolin, eventually finding himself playing a 1920s Gibson mandocello in Peter Ostroushko's band, the Mando Boys. He played kick-butt fiddle for seven years in the Stoney Lonesome bluegrass band, did a number of guitar gigs with various honkytonk bands around the cities, and for three years was in "the house band at a place called Billy Bob's, or something," at Riverplace. After years spent as a road musician and working in construction, he has settled into the relatively quiet St. Paul life of a finish carpenter. He keeps his music honed with jam sessions in the basement.

Peter Ostroushko

He grew up in a musical community, Ukrainian Northeast Minneapolis as it used to be called, and he learned to play a number of instruments early on. He was hired in high school to compose and play the music for a one-man staging of A Christmas Carol, at the Children's Theater School. In the thirty years since that beginning he has been sideman to and traveled with the very famous, been a session player on three or four hundred CDs, has written and produced nine of his own albums and has composed works performed by the St Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Minnesota Sinfonia, the Kremlin Chamber Orchestra, and the symphony orchestras of both Rochester and Des Moines. He's written film scores for Ken Burns' documentaries Lewis & Clark and Mark Twain and has just completed a new soundtrack, released on Red House, for Minnesota: A History of the Land which will be broadcast February 21and 22 . He is a musician's musician and has a press kit filled with superlatives; everything from "solemn grace" and "joyfully funky" to "breathtaking, technically brilliant music." But Jethro Burns put it best when he said: "Go out of your way to see Pete."