“New Songs for an Old Poet” is a series of four concerts spanning July 2025 through June 2026. Organized by long-time Valley vocalist Peter W. Shea, who is also the principal performer, the series presents an enormous variety of songs, all of them musical settings of the great nineteenth-century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, whose verses have been set to music more than any other poet. All are works that Shea has in some way helped to bring into the world, either by suggestion, commission, or premiere, as part of his thirty- year project on Heine and the music he continues to inspire.

“Seas, Birds and Trees,” the final concert in the series, is an evocative potpourri of works by eleven composers, including Massachusetts residents Clifton “Jerry” Noble, Kaeza Fearn, Willis Bridegam, David Kidwell, Gregory Hayes, and the late John Craig Cooper. Two vocalists and seven instrumentalists in numerous combinations will result in a kaleidoscope of musical colors, enhanced by the lovely acoustics of the South Church, Amherst sanctuary.

The ocean was a major recurring theme in Heine’s poetry, particularly the shore and islands of the cold and stormy North Sea, where he spent several holidays in his twenties. They inspired him to write poems that combine rich descriptions of the natural scene with fanciful and ironic tales and poignant love-songs. Those sea poems in turn have inspired much of this concert’s music, which consists of seven solo songs with piano, selections from a nineteenth-century suite for piano four-hands, and five vocal works with two to six instruments. Pianist Brenda Moore Miller will accompany Peter and mezzo-soprano Justina Golden on the solo songs, and will collaborate with Clifton J. Noble on the four-hands music. Noble will accompany the pieces with additional instrumentalists, who are flutist Ellen Redman, clarinetist Hannah Berube, hornist Jean Jeffries, violinist Masako Yanagita, and cellist Mark Fraser.

No tickets needed. Suggested donation $10-$15. No one turned away.