Paul Reiser will take the stage this week at the Bay Street Theatre’s Comedy Club on Monday.

    He is best known for his role as Paul Buchman on NBC’s long-running comedy “Mad About You,” in which he starred with Helen Hunt, and won an Emmy, Golden Globe, American Comedy Award, and Screen Actors Guild nominations for best actor in a comedy series.

    He also had his own show in 2011, “The Paul Reiser Show,” and has appeared in such movies as “Diner,” “Aliens,” “Bye, Bye Love,” and “Beverly Hills Cop I and II.”

    The show will start at 8 p.m., and tickets are $69, or $62 for members.

   Tomorrow, the Sag Harbor Historical Society will hold its Fridays on the Porch with Rebecca Radin of the Parrish Art Museum. She will speak at the Annie Cooper Boyd House about William Merritt Chase’s Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art and its influence on Boyd’s art. The talk and a wine and hors d’oeuvres reception will begin at 5 p.m.

   The annual Bridgehampton Antiques and Design Fair will be open tomorrow through Sunday at the Bridgehampton Community House. In a packed week of art fairs and related events, this fair will feature, among many less elderly items, a fossil mural said to be from 50 million years ago, a 19th-century Belgian day bed, and 4,000-year-old jade.

    The five-year-old fair will have 25 dealers from 14 states and several countries showing everything from antiquities to mid-century modern and contemporary design. There will be quilts, lighting, folk art, vintage Gucci and Hermes accessories, garden and architectural elements ,and other rare and unusual finds, including a hand-carved canoe. The fair will be open daily from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and will close at 5 p.m. on Sunday. Admission is $5.

   “Growing Farmers,” a short documentary about the work that the Peconic Land Trust is doing with new farmers on the East End, will be shown at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on Friday, July 19.

    The film won the audience award for best short film at last year’s Hamptons International Film Festival. The presentation will begin at 6 p.m., and will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Michael Halsband and Hilary Leff, who directed the film; John v.H. Halsey of the Peconic Land Trust, and several farmers from the film. Reservations are requested and can be made by contacting the museum by phone or by visiting its Web site.

   On Wednesday, the Southampton Cultural Center will continue its 2013 Concerts in the Park Series with Matt Daniels, a New York composer and songwriter, who will play a mix of jazz, blues, and rock ’n’ roll from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

More Aycock, Now

In East Hampton

    The “Alice Aycock: New Works on Paper” exhibition will open on Saturday at the Drawing Room in East Hampton.

    Ms. Aycock came of age as an artist between the Modernist and Post-Modernist eras in the 1970s. She is known for her large-scale installations, public art projects, and outdoor sculptures. As the gallery notes, she is a conceptualist at heart and her drawings are driven by language, memory, fiction, and scientific and philosophical extremes.

    The show will be on view through Aug. 12.

Show Us “The money . . .”

    Tomorrow, Harper’s Books in East Hampton will open “The money . . . ,”  photography by Roe Ethridge.

    Mr. Ethridge’s background is in editorial and commercial photography. He is cognizant of the potential for high and low forms of the art to merge, much as the Pictures Generation did, in a way that has been called post-appropriative.

    The photographer’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Tate Modern in London.

    A reception will be held tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m. The show will run through Aug. 8.

Vered On the Edge

    This year’s version of “Art on the Edge” will open at Vered Gallery tomorrow with a 9 to 11 p.m. cocktail reception, and a satellite exhibit at art­MRKT Hamptons today through Monday. The show, now in its fourth year, is an annual survey of “the most provocative new painters, sculptors, and photographers working in their respective mediums today,” according to the gallery.

    Among the artists participating are Ron Agam, Tim Conlon, Grant Haffner, Jessica Lichtenstein, Brian Richer, and Dean West.

    The show will continue there through Aug. 5. It can also be seen on the East Hampton gallery’s Web site, veredart. com.

Midweek Mix at Ashawagh

    Beginning on Tuesday with a reception from 4 to 7 p.m., “Midsummer Mix,” a group show, will feature artists working in a variety of styles, including landscapes, medieval portraits, tapestry, Abstract Expressionism, mixed media, and representational art.

    The artists include Barbara Bilotta, Johanna Caleca, Lance Corey, Anna Franklin, Annette Heller, Robin Howe, Alyce Peifer, Sal Salandra, Dainis Saulitis, Catherine Silver, Richard Udice, and Elizabeth Weiss. It will remain on view through next Thursday.

Ortiz: Not Keith Haring

    Lawrence Fine Art in East Hampton will open an exhibition of new work by Angel Ortiz, known by his tags as LA ROC or LA II, today through July 28.

    Mr. Ortiz was one of the original graffiti artists of the 1970s and 1980s. According to the gallery, he was sought out by Keith Haring in 1981 because of his distinctively unique tag. Their artistic partnership lasted five years and introduced Haring to street-art culture, arguably influencing his development as an artist.

    Mr. Ortiz, who has since created functional sculpture and work on canvas, will work in East Hampton throughout the exhibition, though not on buildings. On July 20, a reception and fashion show will be held at the gallery at 5 p.m.

Painting at Madoo

    Madoo Conservancy’s summer painting classes in Sagaponack will begin Saturday for six sessions. Eric Dever will teach and Robert Dash, the founder of Madoo, will offer critiques.

    The aim is that intermediate to advanced students develop and examine painting fundamentals in the context of the Madoo Gardens while broadening their approach. Students may use acrylic or other mediums, with the exception of oils. Classes will take place weekly from 9 a.m. to noon; the fee is $350, or $300 for Madoo members. Registration is available at [email protected].

New Paintings at Grenning

    The Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor will open its second show of the summer season on Saturday, with a reception from 6:30 to 8 p.m. The show features the latest works of Ramiro and Melissa Franklin Sanchez.

    Ramiro Sanchez, “a very special artist” to the gallery, is known for his depictions of the human form. Melissa Sanchez paints on copper plates, capturing the glow from her material. The exhibition includes a dual portrait by the husband-and-wife team.

    It will be on view through July 28.

Pagano at Nightingale

    The Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill is showing “William Pagano: Here and Sometimes There” through July 31.

    Mr. Pagano is a New York artist known for stripping away unnecessary form both from his own photographs and appropriated images, to focus on the line, shape, and space that remains. He utilizes the translucency of oil paint to further emphasize volume, scale, and light in his paintings.

    In his “Modern House” series, two midcentury residences serve as the main inspiration: the Stahl House by Pierre Koenig, and Twin Palms by E. Stewart Williams. Among his other subjects are various highway interchanges and the Dulles Airport terminal C, designed by Eero Saarinen.

AAranged: Aakash Nihalani

    Tripoli Gallery in Southampton will present “Aaranged,” the artwork of Aakash Nihalani, beginning today, with a reception on Wednesday from 6 to 8 p.m.

    The artist uses black, white, and fluorescent tape to make Frank Stella-inspired compositions that echo the forms of urban architecture. Often Op Art in nature, the forms highlight and alter the perspective of the space they are in. New work in the show incorporates wood tiles with black silk-screened lines in geometric patterns.

    One of the artist’s site-specific works will be displayed on an exterior wall of the Parrish Art Museum during the museum’s Midsummer party on Saturday. Tripoli Patterson will be a co-host for the event, which is sold out, but tickets remain for the After-Ten dessert party.

    The Nihalani show will remain on view at the gallery until Aug. 11.

Photos at the Old Parrish

    The Southampton Center will begin its exhibition program with a show of work by Diane Tuft, a Water Mill photographer who travels to various places in the world that have high levels of ultraviolet radiation, to document the effects of infrared and UV light on the landscape. Her images from Greenland and Iceland will be on view at the new center, in the space once occupied by the Parrish Art Museum on Job’s Lane in Southampton, from Saturday to Aug. 4.

    There will be a cocktail reception on the opening night of the exhibit from 6 to 8, followed by a screening of the award-winning documentary “Chasing Ice,” presented in partnership with the Hamptons International Film Festival.

Merrill and Friends

    Peter Marcelle Gallery will present “Dina Merrill and Friends,” with work by Ms. Merrill, Ted Hartley, Virginia Burke, Lucy Cookson, Miriam Dougenis, Lynn Hanke, Bonnie Lowe, Aniik Libby, Michelle Murphy, and Alice Connick Ryan, beginning tomorrow.

    The show will open with a champagne reception from 6 to 8 p.m. and will remain on view through July 21.

    Ms. Merrill, known as an actress, philanthropist, and socialite, is now also an artist. She became seriously interested in painting several years ago, and her husband, Mr. Hartley, organized a painting group, led by Ms. Dougenis, to meet in their house twice a week.

    The paintings on view offer evidence of development over time of color, tone, and composition, as well as showing off a community of shared interests.

Lieberman’s Summer

In Water Mill

    The Hampton Hang gallery in Water Mill is presenting “Bruce Lieberman: Portraits of Summer” through July 25.

    The show is a selection of recent works exploring the relationship between the artist, the canvas, and the subject of an intimate Hamptons summer, according to the gallery. A reception will be held on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

Hornak on View in Maryland

    The Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Md., is showing “Transparent Barricades: Ian Hornak, a Retrospective” through Oct. 13.

    The artist, who died in 2002, was a longtime resident of East Hampton. He was represented by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and the Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery in Manhattan.

    The show will feature more than 30 of Hornak’s paintings and drawings completed between 1958 and 2002. Eric Ian Hornak Spoutz, the artist’s nephew and the founder and executive director of the Ian Hornak Foundation, will speak about the artist at the museum on Sept. 19.

Art Is in the House

    ARTed will present “a moment in the sun” by Cole Sternberg in a house in Wainscott, beginning today with a reception tomorrow from 6 to 9 p.m.

    The project, with public viewing hours from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. through the weekend, is set in a farmhouse and barn as “a play on the artistic traditions of the Hamptons, concepts of artist residencies, and an environmental takeover.”

    Mr. Sternberg is a Los Angeles artist with a B.A. from Villanova and a law degree from Washington College who spent the month of June bending the house to his vision “grounded through common themes of environmentalism, media influence, and the last performance of Ray Johnson,” a Sag Harbor artist who died in 1995. The installation examines the tensions between the luxury consumerist culture and the natural beauty of the environment here. One of the works on view is a film shot on location here.

    After this weekend, the installation will be on view by appointment through Piers Beaumont at piers@artedhouse .com through July 28. The house is at 28 Wainscott Hollow Road.

    The work on exhibit is for sale and a portion of the proceeds will benefit the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons and Group for the East End.

   With Reporting by Sergei Klebnikov

    Mid-July has become art fair season on the South Fork, with three fairs running in rapid succession, two this weekend in Bridgehampton and another beginning July 25 in Southampton.

    Both ArtHamptons and artMRKT Hamptons will open their doors tonight with previews and cocktail parties for their own exhibitors, sponsors, media partners, honorees, events, and beneficiaries.

    The sixth edition of ArtHamptons, the oldest of the fairs, will take place at Nova’s Ark sculpture fields off Millstone Road. It will boast a 50,000-square-foot tent and a theme of “Hamptons Bohemia.” Its honorees will be the very much alive Edward Albee and Billy Sullivan, and Larry Rivers, who died in 2002. Its opening-night party will benefit Guild Hall. Its events include a polo demonstration and an Empire Pride Agenda tea dance in addition to a number of private receptions and educational talks.

    Now in its third year, artMRKT will be on the grounds of the Bridgehampton Historical Society and benefit the Parrish Art Museum and the LongHouse Reserve. Although somewhat of an upstart, the younger fair has captured the hearts and minds of much of the South Fork gallery and dealer establishment. Exhibitors include Boltax Gallery, Bridgehampton Fine Art, Eric Firestone Gallery, Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Halsey Mckay Gallery,  Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, Mark Humphrey Gallery, Neoteric Fine Arts, QF Gallery, Sara Nightingale, the Grenning Gallery, Tripoli Gallery, and Vered Art Gallery, in addition to galleries from Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Florida,  New Orleans, and yet farther-flung places. A total of 40 galleries will exhibit.

    Of note will be an installation and performance by Adam Stennett from Glenn Horowitz on the grounds of the fair. “Artist Survival Shack: 96 Hour Test Run” will be a demonstration project for a longer performance on the East End. The artist will set up his 6.5-by-9.5-foot “survival shack” for the duration of the fair. A monthlong performance will follow with an exhibition of the shack, related paintings, and artifacts, opening in September at the gallery.

    The QF Gallery in East Hampton will have three installations at the artMRKT entrance.

    At ArtHamptons, exhibitors include Lawrence Fine Art, Mark Borghi Fine Art, Monika Olko Gallery, Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery, and Tulla Booth from the South Fork, and dealers from Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America, in addition to domestic and North American galleries, 80 galleries in all.

    Both fairs will remain open through Sunday. Full details and schedules can be found on arthamptons.com and art-mrkt.com. Tickets start at $20 for a day pass for artMRKT and $25 for ArtHamptons and increase for multiple days or for the preview parties.

   Stephanie Whiston of Montauk has dived in deep seas over 1,000 times in the last 20 years. And all because of her little fear of sharks!

    A friend suggested she combat that fear by diving with the often-maligned creatures. She now photographs them and other underwater species, and it has become her life’s work.

    On one of her first dives, in 1993 aboard a National Geographic Society vessel, a crew member lent her a camera, and she ended up winning first place in a photography contest sponsored by the society.

    Her archives are now full of pictures of underwater sea life, and choosing just 50 of them for an exhibit that is running now through the end of the month at the Montauk Library was difficult. She has no favorites.

    She does want it known that although she favors conservation, she is not a tree-hugger and does not oppose Montauk’s annual shark-fishing tournaments. She hopes, however, that her exhibit brings about an awareness of the sharks’ declining numbers.

    “I don’t want everyone in Montauk to be mad at me,” she said on Sunday while leading a visitor through her exhibit, which is on view on the library’s lower level. “I’m just a scuba diver with a camera.”

    Her enthusiasm is obvious when she discusses her diving adventures. She animatedly imitates fish faces and points out the ones she has named, such as Smiley, a shark she swears smiled at her while her camera was catching him.

    Born in Dublin, Ireland, Ms. Whiston moved to New York in 1972. She developed her fear of sharks after watching Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” a memorable film that came to her mind the first time a shark turned around and swam back toward her, on her 50th dive.

    “It’s all I thought about; that first scene when the girl gets attacked by the great white,” Ms. Whiston said. “It turned around and came right toward me. I started hyperventilating; I thought I was going to die. I figured it was up to God. If I was going to die, I just wanted it to happen fast.”

    To control herself, she placed her hand on a piece of coral on the sea floor to steady her body and stayed as still as possible while practicing controlled breathing. The shark breezed right past her.

    “They have no interest in us. We’re the predators. The worst thing I have to worry about is getting hit with a fin,” she said, noting that there are 800 species of sharks, only 8 of which might be aggressive.

    Her diving interest has taken her all over the world, including to the Galapagos Islands, Hawaii, the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos, and Australia. Asked if she had a favorite spot, she couldn’t come up with one. “Maldives is amazing. Thailand is untouchable, and Fiji is unbelievable,” she said.

    “It’s so natural being under the water; we should be able to breathe under there,” she said.

    Her photographs at the library are sharp, vivid, and colorful. In addition to sharks, there are pictures of lionfish, groupers, frogfish, stingrays, sea lions, turtles, kissing fish, clownfish, and lots of colorful coral, one piece of which, she pointed out, resembles a vase with flowers tumbling from it in a way that recalls a still-life painting.

    One of her pictures is of a creature in the Indian Ocean that has never been documented, according to officials there who are still researching whether the shrimp-type species was ever previously found. If not, then Ms. Whiston will receive the honor of naming it. She’s planning on calling it a nipple fish, since — well, go see the picture and you’ll see why the name is fitting.

    Ms. Whiston is a painter as well as an underwater photographer, and works from a studio at her house in Montauk. It’s where she framed all of the pictures in the current show.

    She gave the first of two presentations at the library last night. On Sunday she will give another, from 2:30 to 5 p.m. She is available for private discussion by appointment.

    The exhibit includes video footage of her dives and extreme close-ups with the fish. Her plan next is to try to incorporate her photographs into a children’s book. She is also getting in touch with local restaurant owners to see if they would like to stream the video in their establishments.

   The surprise that is Noel Coward is coming to the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall next week, starring Blythe Danner and Simon Jones, and directed by Tony Walton, in the form of “Tonight at 8:30.”

   Coward wrote the show in the 1930s as a touring vehicle for himself and his longtime friend and working partner Gertrude Lawrence. It’s actually a collection of 10 one-act plays. Each night the partners would choose three to perform, at, of course, 8:30.

   Coward is usually thought of as sharp-witted and erudite, which he was, but also patrician, which he was anything but.

   “Coward was lower class. He was introduced to the upper class in his early teens and was appalled at their behavior and their hypocrisy,” Mr. Walton said in a recent interview. “He was able to absorb it, tease it, satirize it” in his writings.

    “The very first play is about class,” the director said of “Hands Across the Sea,” which leads off the evening, followed by “Family Album” and “Red Peppers.”

    Thematically, Mr. Walton is loosely tying the production together with “Red Peppers,” a play about a bickering vaudeville couple. The concept of class and class differentiation can prove elusive for American actors, something the director is well aware of.

    When he first came to New York, he spent several years going to the Actor’s Studio as an observer, “just to see Marilyn,” he said with a smile. Actually, he was soaking in the vibrant creativity of the city’s theater community of the 1950s. He saw firsthand the difficulties actors can have in handling Coward material.

    He recalled, for example, watching Shelly Winters and Albert Salmi do a two-minute scene (“It took about 20 minutes”) from “Private Lives.” Paul Newman critiqued the exercise afterward, in the rather cutting manner that was encouraged at the Studio at that time. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, according to Mr. Walton. “You should have treated this like a piece of music.”

    In the lead opposite Ms. Danner is Simon Jones. “I was born and brought up on an estate,” Mr. Jones, a Brit, said recently. The lord of the manor was down on his luck. To his face, he was “m’lord,” but among Mr. Jones’s fellow working-class residents of the estate, he was simply “Lordy.”

    Mr. Jones believes the challenge to Americans playing Coward is simply a question of confidence, something Ms. Danner does not lack.

    The production came about following an exchange among Josh Gladstone, artistic director, Ms. Danner, and Mr. Walton, who were looking for a good project. Ms. Danner had done “Tonight at 8:30” in Williamstown, Mass., in 2000, and was eager to do it again. She’d performed two of the three plays there, but in one of them, “Family Album,” she’ll be playing a different part at the John Drew.

    “This is Noel Coward telling little tales,” Mr. Walton said of the material. “He called them ‘After-Dinner Mints.’ ”

    Mr. Walton agrees that Noel Coward should be treated as “a piece of music,” but knows there is more to it. After putting together the cast, he went on a search for an interview done many years ago with the actress Irene Worth, in which she was asked about the different approaches to acting she had encountered in her long career.

    “You know who was the most remarkable method actor I ever worked with?” she responded. “Of course he’d be horrified to hear me say it, but Noel Coward. There wasn’t anything he’d do on stage that wasn’t truthful. Not necessarily realistic, but absolutely truthful.”

    Mr. Walton came to directing after a stellar career as a designer. Both his parents happened to have been born near Mr. Coward’s native town, Teddington, in England, and growing up, Coward was a personal hero of his.

    He came to America to pursue a stage designer’s career and to be with his future wife, Julie Andrews, who was starring on Broadway in “The Boyfriend” (and later in “My Fair Lady”).

    It was Noel Coward himself who gave Mr. Walton his first big break, hiring him to design the set and lights for “Conversation Piece” in 1957. While Mr. Walton felt at ease with scenic design, lighting was another matter.

    Mr. Coward was quite subtle when necessary, said the director. One day, during rehearsal, he called Mr. Walton over to talk about the lighting.

    “Young Tony. Do we really believe that the summer in Brighton in 1815 was this dire and gloomy?” he inquired.

    During the lunch break, Mr. Walton worked with Abe Feder, a legendary lighting designer and one of his mentors in the business, to alter the design. When Coward returned after lunch, he looked at the stage for a moment. “I see the weather in Brighton seems to have improved considerably,” he said dryly.

    “Tonight at 8:30” opens on Wednesday and will run through Aug. 4, Tuesdays through Sundays, at you-know-what-time,  with Sunday matinees at 2. Tickets range from $50 for the orchestra (preferred seating is $60) to $30 for the balcony, with a small discount for Guild members.

   The Choral Society of the Hamptons joined with the Greenwich Village Singers and the South Fork Chamber Orchestra on Saturday evening to fill the Parish Hall at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in East Hampton with the glorious sounds of masterpieces by Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, composers who brought Baroque music to its peak.

    Bach’s Cantata “Gott, der Herr, ist Sonn’ und Schild” (BWV 79) opened the program with a flourish. Originally written for the 1725 Lutheran Reformation Festival at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, the piece immediately achieves a celebratory mood by juxtaposing two horns against a rather jaunty countermelody in the strings and oboes. Under the clear and amiable direction of Mark Mangini, the South Fork Chamber Orchestra skillfully laid the foundation for the first thrilling entry of the chorus.

    In each of the choral movements of the cantata, the Choral Society and Greenwich Village Singers demonstrated a delightful combination of vigor and dexterity.

    The singer’s careful preparation was evident in the clear German diction, accuracy of entrances, and precision of consonant placement. This attention to detail helped to clarify the architecture and message of the music for the audience and freed the singers to express their joy at engaging with such finely crafted music.

    Whether navigating adroitly through a fugue or joining to offer a chorale, the chorus sang with beautiful tone and confident intonation. Mr. Mangini’s gestures during contrapuntal passages highlighted each appearance of the fugue subject: essential guidance for the performers, of course, but also helpful in directing the attention of the audience to each recurrence of the main theme.

    The cantata’s second movement features an aria for alto, brought pleasantly to life by Suzanne Schwing amid the delicately dancing ministrations of the principal oboist, Hugo Souza. Sara Paar and Mischa Bouvier were quite expressive and enjoyable to hear in the duet for soprano and bass in the fifth movement.

    Mr. Mangini and the South Fork Chamber Orchestra — a roundup of accomplished professionals from all over Long Island and beyond, which springs into existence whenever needed for a Choral Society concert — then presented the fourth movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1. They did an excellent job with this challenging work. There  was not a weak player among them, but special regard is due to the horn section. The tessitura of the horn parts in Cantata 79 lies quite high in the range throughout (especially on modern instruments), while the first horn part in Brandenburg No. 1 is stratospherically virtuosic.

    Thanks to the principal hornist, Luiza Raab-Pontecorvo, and her colleague, John-Morgan Bush, no one listening had any idea that the horn parts were an unusual challenge. They made the job seem easy.

    English oratorios as a genre show that necessity is often the mother of, if not always invention, at least innovation and exploitation. With the Church proscribing licentious and pagan entertainments like opera and theater during Lent, Handel successfully adapted the Italian oratorio model to the English language and public. Eliminating sets, costumes, and staging, and using Biblical story lines instead of pagan mythology, allowed creators of oratorio to work around the Church’s objections, while still providing audiences with dramatic musical settings of compelling stories.

    Saturday’s concert presented the central, dramatic portion of Handel’s “Israel in Egypt.” While an oratorio, like an opera, normally alternates between choral and solo or small group textures to tell its story, “Israel” employs the chorus as narrator nearly all of the time. Ms. Schwing returned for the alto solos and Gregory Mercer, a professional who also sang with the tenor section for the oratorio, delivered the two recitatives quite vividly.

    In fact, the whole piece is vivid: After all, the text and music portray the plagues visited upon Egypt before the Exodus. Handel clearly had a lot of fun writing musical figures to illustrate bloody rivers, flies and lice, fiery hailstones, and, especially, the blindness that comes with overwhelming darkness. The singers, divided into two separate choruses, handled these images in a way that showed they relished the chance to communicate such rich text painting.

    During the final movement, while singing enthusiastically of how “the horse and his rider” had been “thrown into the sea,” it seemed that one or more tenors were not far from breaking into a dance upon Pharaoh’s grave. Throughout all the choral movements, the singers maintained an impressive level of commitment to precision in attacks and cutoffs as well as clear articulation and animated interpretation of the text.

    In the eighth movement, the tenors were first to introduce a rangy and angular fugue subject on the text “He sent a thick darkness over the land. . . .” At this highly exposed moment (and once more in another movement) the blend in the tenor section became suspect as individual voices became more prominent on certain notes. However, this was an aberration in an otherwise solid performance from the section.

    That some difficulty arose among the sopranos of chorus one to keep to tempo in the melismatic passages of the final movement was surprising. However, the concert called for a lot of singing from the chorus, and despite having sung a rehearsal of the program earlier that day, the singers maintained fantastic vocal and facial energy all the way through the final cadence.

    It was a privilege to experience the incredible collaboration of so many singers and instrumentalists as they reinvigorated musical works whose pedigree is centuries old. Congratulations to all involved in sharing with the East End community such a vibrant, impressive display of talent and musicality.