A bluegrass Mass and more

While it’s generally made its bread and butter singing classics of the Renaissance and Baroque era of great choral writing, Da Camera Singers also has a hoary tradition of commissioning new works from western Massachusetts composers, including Clifton J. “Jerry” Noble, whose latest composition, “Where Does the Magic Go?,” the Amherst-based 44-year-old choral ensemble will premiere Saturday night at Smith College’s Helen Hills Hills Chapel in a concert titled “Fill the Earth with Glorious Sounds.”

A work for French horn and piano, Noble’s piece takes as its text seven spare, late-in-life poems by Mary Elizabeth Betty Langlois, a teacher, journalist and country philosopher Noble met when his wife was helping the poet to get her first collection self-published.

“They deal with everything from grace to suffering, truth to magic, hummingbirds to the serenity of the afternoon sunlight,” says Noble, who notes that the poet specifically links the latter image to the sound of the French horn.

Standing in stark contrast, the second work on the program is “The World Beloved,” a reinterpretation of the Roman Catholic Mass that pairs parts of the Latin text with traditional bluegrass instrumentation — banjo, fiddle, bass, mandolin, guitar — while mixing in folk spiritual ballads. Written by Minnesota composer Carol Barnett, with a libretto by Marisha Chamberlain, the piece had its premiere in 2013, prompting one reviewer to call it “a classical piece of choral music that’s a stunningly beautiful work of art.”

7:30 p.m. Donation at the door. Helen Hills Hills Chapel is at 123 Elm St. in Northampton. 584-1948.

Chekhov with pratfalls

Built on the witty conceit of theatrical backstage chaos as a metaphor for political chaos, Nagle Jackson’s “Quick-Change Room (Scenes from a Revolution)” takes place at the Kuzlov Theater in St. Petersburg in 1991, just as the 75-year-old Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Communist state known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is in full meltdown mode. Engaged in a revival of Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters,” the members of the acting troupe have been thrown into a panic by the discovery that the evaporation of government-subsidized art will require them to adapt to the rules of trendy, Western-style commercialism in order to survive. Watch aghast as Chekhov’s masterpiece becomes transmogrified into an American-type musical called “O My Sister!”

“Even though it’s set within a real historical event, it’s pure comic fiction – a roller-coaster of backstage backbiting and artistic angst, where the ruble rules and Chekhov spins in his grave,” says Chris Rohmann, director of the Ashfield Community Theater production that opens this weekend.

Shows in Ashfield Town Hall are Friday and Saturday, May 27-28 and June 3-4, at 7 p.m. and Sunday, May 29 at 2 p.m. Tickets opening night are $6; all other shows $12. acth.org.

— Dan DeNicola