Our 2008-2009 year will begin with Mozart's Solemn Vespers for the Feast of a Confessor, K 339. The concert will take place November 23rd in Abbey Chapel at Mount Holyoke College, and will feature professional orchestra. Rehearsals begin Tuesday, September 16th, 2008, in Northampton. For information about auditions, directions and schedule, visit our resources page.
About Mozart's Solemn Vespers for the Feast of a Confessor:
Mozart wrote the Solemn Vespers in 1780; it was commissioned for the Salzburg Cathedral in which he was baptised, and was one of the final works he wrote before he moved to Vienna. A product of his full maturity, the Vespers was considered by Craig Smith, the founder of the Emmanuel Music Series, to be Mozart's greatest complete sacred work, a product of the same genius that produced the unfinished masterpieces the Mass in C Minor and the Requiem.
At 3:00 PM on June 15, 2008, at John M. Greene Hall, Smith College, Northampton, the Hampshire Choral Society performed Bach's choral masterwork, the Mass in B minor.
The 160 voices of the chorus were accompanied by a professional orchestra, and soloists Sudie Marcuse, soprano; Mary Brown Bonacci, mezzo-soprano; Allen Combs, tenor; and Steve Curylo, bass. Our capacity audience numbered at least 750, and, we're happy to report, burst into a thunderous standing ovation at the concert's end. Conductor Allan Taylor twice returned to the stage to acknowledge applause.
A few tracks from the dress rehearsal, recorded by a chorister, may be found here. A professional recording of the entire concert will be available soon - an order form may be downloaded here.
About Bach's Mass in B minor:
In 1745, the influential critic Johann Adolph Scheibe complained that J.S. Bach was not in the first rank of German composers. Bach’s music might be truly great "if he had more amenity, if he did not take away the natural element in his pieces by giving them a turgid and confused style, and if he did not darken their beauty by an excess of art."
Perhaps in response, Bach wrote his two final and most intricate works – The Art of the Fugue, and the B-minor Mass. Completed in 1749, the year before his untimely death at the age of 65, Bach intended each to establish his legacy, defend his techniques, and instruct his successors.
He was successful; as musicologist Christoph Wolf writes "Like no other work of Bach’s, the B-minor Mass represents a summary of his writing for voice, not only in its variety of styles, compositional devices, and range of sonorities, but also in its high level of technical polish. The Mass offers a full panoply of the art of musical composition, with a breadth and depth betraying not only theoretical perspicacity but also a comprehensive grasp of music history, particularly in its use of old and new styles."
Yet the B-minor is so fiercely difficult and unconventional that it was not performed in its entirety until over 100 years after Bach’s death, and not in the United States until 1900.
On Sunday, November 18th at 3:00 PM, the Hampshire Choral Society performed a program featuring Gabriel Fauré's Requiem in D minor, with professional orchestra, Jennifer Tyo, soprano, and Jack Tozzi, bass. The concert took place before a large and enthusiastic audience at Abbey Chapel in South Hadley.
The program also included seasonal works performed by the Hampshire Young People's Chorus, K.C. Conlan, conductor.
About Fauré's Requiem in D minor:
The 20th Century American Composer Aaron Copland once referred to Gabriel Fauré as the "French Brahms." Like Brahms, Fauré practiced a restrained Romanticism; his sublety and appreciation of form were more akin to Baroque and Classical composers than the late Romantics. Fauré's Requiem in D minor, Op. 48 is a perfect example - unlike the compositions of Wagner or Berlioz, it seldom asks musicians to rise above a mezzoforte. Fauré once emphatically wrote of it "altogether it is as GENTLE as I am myself!!"
This gentleness gives the entire work a rare combination of profundity and peacefulness. As Fauré also wrote, "It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience."
In keeping with the restrained quality of this work, Fauré originally scored it for chamber orchestra. Unfortunately, this became eclipsed by a version for full orchestra, most likely composed by one of Fauré's students. John Rutter rediscovered Fauré's manuscript for the chamber orchestra in the early 1980s. Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor, this is the version the Hampshire Choral Society performed.
On Sunday, June 17th at 3:00 PM, the Hampshire Choral Society performed Joseph Haydn's The Seasons, with professional orchestra. The concert took place at John M. Greene Hall, on Elm Street, Northampton before a very appreciative audience. Recordings are available
Soloists:
Joanne Scattergood, soprano (Hanne)
Marc Winer, tenor (Lukas)
Peter Shea, baritone (Simon)
About The Seasons:
In 1790 Joseph Haydn was invited to England to compose a series of symphonies, a form for which he was justifiably internationally famous. While in London, Haydn was exposed to the oratorios of Handel. They made quite an impression on him, and inspired him to compose The Creation, a work on which he labored from 1796-8, using the libretto of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, a minor Austrian noble.
The Creation was a tremendous artistic and commercial success, and in early 1799 Haydn began work on a sequel, again employing the talents of van Swieten. Together they conceived of not just one, but two additional works - a second oratorio to celebrate the life of created beings, and a final work about the last judgment. For the former, van Swieten translated sections of The Seasons, a very popular contemporary English poem by James Thomson. Thompson's poem is in the pastoral tradition, celebrating simple peasant virtues and pleasures in harmony with nature's yearly cycle.
Unfortunately, it is generally agreed that van Swieten's adaptation in not one of his finest. Indeed, Haydn became very frustrated with the libretto, calling it "French trash" to his friends, and remarking that, while he was an industrious man, he had never before composed a chorus in praise of industry. Haydn was also rather unhappy to be required to tone paint in the style of croaking frogs. But tone paint he did - not only frogs, but a sunrise, thunderstorms, the fall of a bird shot by hunters, and a plowman whistling a theme from Haydn's own Surprise Symphony. Indeed, the richness of the work almost reminds one of the Flemish Masters - Pieter Bruegel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," for example - so packed is it with whimsy and cunning detail.
Word of Haydn's displeasure got back to van Swieten, and the two of them fell out; the third oratorio was never begun. But hints of what it might have been are found in The Seasons' stirring conclusion, in text that prefigures the last judgment and was original to van Swieten:
Who shall enjoy eternal peace?
He who protected the innocent.
Behold the dawn of that great morning.
Behold, the light shines.
This proved to be foreshadowing. Van Swieten died not long after he wrote these words, and The Seasons was one of Haydn's last major works.
The Seasons is not performed nearly so often as The Creation, possibly in part because it is a bit intimidating. It is a monumental work, with extensive choruses and full orchestra.
However, it is a work of genius, and an influential one; Beethoven, for example, borrowed motifs from it for both the third and fourth movements of his Pastoral Symphony.
This January, the Hampshire Choral Society performed the Mozart Requiem, as completed by his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayer. It was an intense experience, with only five rehearsals culminating in a capacity crowd on January 28th, 3 PM, at Northampton High School.
Allan Taylor, the orchestra and soloists all volunteered their time, and did a magnificent job. We owe them our thanks. Thanks also to State Street Fruit and Broadside Books in Northampton; A.J. Hastings in Amherst; and Cooper’s Corner in Florence for selling tickets for us. All proceeds from our concert will benefit a very worthy cause: the Cancer Connection, a not-for-profit drop-in center located at the Silk Mill in Florence, MA that offers support services to cancer survivors. We encourage you to visit www.cancer-connection.com to learn more.
On November 19th at 3 PM, in honor of the 250th anniversary of his birth, we performed Mozart’s Mass in C,
K. 139, otherwise known as the Waisenhaus Messe. This is Mozart’s earliest large-scale ("solemnis") setting, which we performed with a 15-piece orchestra, including trumpets and timpani. In Allan’s words, "Mozart wrote lots of Masses in C, but this one is hardly ever done…it’s full of energy and wit, and will be lots of fun."
K 139 is known as the Waisenhausmesse (Orphanage Mass) because it was written for the consecration of the chapel of an orphanage. So beautiful and developed a work is it that there was once a great deal of controversy regarding its date of composition. Scholarly consensus has come to the somewhat grudging conclusion that it was composed in 1768, when Mozart was but 13. It is a reflection of Mozart's genius that his creative output when barely a teenager rivals the works of most other composers at their heights.
The concert took place at Smith College's J.M. Greene Hall, Elm St., Northampton.
The Hampshire Choral Society performed the Bach St. John Passion at 3:00 PM on June 11th, 2006, John M. Greene Hall, Smith College, Northampton, MA, before an enthusiastic and receptive audience.
On May 7th, 2006, HCS joined the Pioneer Valley Symphony to perform the Brahms German Requiem at the Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The performance was an artistic success. According to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, "from the first movement of the seven-part piece, Selig sind, die da Leid tragen (Blessed are they that mourn), the 250 vocalists showed their ability to react to the shape of the orchestra's sound with a sensitive opening that introduced the work's main themes. In particular, during the movement's feathery middle section, as the flutes and clarinets weaved among the vocal voicings, the chorus hovered with deft balance. As the piece built and the full orchestra rose in volume, the chorus unleashed its breadth alongside, setting the tone for the remainder of the monumental work." Read the remainder of the review here.