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Boston Globe article on CWC's 50th

Jane Ring Frank, in her 17th year as conductor of the Concord Women’s Chorus, has worked to bring a more complex kind of music to the repertoire. She and the group turned 50 this year. (Wendy Maeda/Globe Staff)

Jane Ring Frank celebrated her 50th birthday last week. By happy coincidence, the Concord Women’s Chorus, of which she is music director, is celebrating its 50th year, too. “We have, in essence, grown up together,’’ Frank says with a laugh.

Fifty is a significant milestone for any musical group, especially a community chorus whose membership has grown from 18 to 70 during the 17 years of Frank’s tenure. To mark the occasion, the chorus has commissioned a piece from the renowned American composer Libby Larsen, which will be premiered at a concert tomorrow night. “We had what I think was a wonderful conversation, and it fit and fell into place in exactly the right way,’’ says the conductor. Not only had Frank conducted a number of Larsen’s choral works over the years, but the composer was willing to work with the three texts provided by the chorus.

Those texts are all by Concordians: two from prominent 19th-century residents — a letter from Lidian Emerson and a diary entry of Martha Lawrence Prescott — and one by Melissa Apperson, a poet and chorus member. Taken together, Frank says, the writings do more than merely salute the chorus’s home base. “We ended up with three movements that quite beautifully exemplify the light and life cycles of women’s lives,’’ she says.

Larsen’s music for “Concord Fragments,’’ as the piece is titled, is scored for oboe, clarinet, piano, and chorus. Frank says the piece is tonal and colored to match the mood of each text, growing in warmth across the three movements. The setting for Emerson’s “In some dry, dry earth’’ is spare and delicate, while that for Apperson’s poetic vision of Walden, which Frank calls “kind of the mature, blue unison of this group of women coming to their 50th anniversary,’’ is more richly textured, with a galloping rhythm underneath.

Also on the program are pieces by American women composers whose works stretch across more than a century. The pieces share a substantiality that Frank says is missing in much of the women’s chorus repertoire. Indeed, part of what she’s tried to do during her tenure is to move the chorus away from what she calls the “little-girl style’’ that marks much of the music written for women’s choruses — “the schoolmarm music of the classical world,’’ Frank says.

When she came to the Concord chorus, the conductor says, “they mostly sang a very nice but very standard a cappella repertoire. Very predictable: madrigals and songs and the kind of music we think of sometimes when we think of a community women’s chorus.’’

The change to more complex programming was made official when the group changed its name a few years ago from the Concord Madrigals to the Concord Women’s Chorus. It signified “in a good way, while keeping the history, that the repertoire and the vision had really changed. And the group now numbering 70, I would argue that that was a very successful change.’’

At First Parish in Concord, 20 Lexington Road, 978- 852-4239, www.concordwomenschorus.org