By Mike Genet mike.genet@examiner.net
The Examiner
If the downtime from pandemic led to a great period of inspiring new creative works from those who make a living in the fine arts – writing, composing, drawing – for Independence’s Dana Mengel it wasn’t terribly different.
“I have not needed to change at all; I always compose as I had,” says Mengel, a prolific composer and longtime violin virtuoso. “I write what I hear when I compose. When I finish a piece, I go to the next piece.”
Mengel has more than 1,000 sacred choral pieces to his name since 1990, and then over the past decade shifted his focus to string orchestrations. Thursday evening marks a virtual premier of a piece of that takes the latter and somewhat revisits the prior concentration.