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Cantata Singers 2008-2009 program descriptions Notes by David Hoose Friday, September 19, 8:00 pm – Institute of Contemporary Art The Alice Ditson Fund is beginning a sponsorship of a new music festival every second year, each time in a different city. The first of this ambitious series will be in Boston, will celebrate music of Boston composers, and will feature the most respected and important ensembles in the city that, year after year, demonstrate their commitment to contemporary music. Surrounded by other marvelous musical organizations, including Boston Musica Viva, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Dinosaur Annex, Firebird Ensemble, and Collage New Music, Cantata Singers is the only one appearing in the festival that is not a ‘new music organization.’ This is a very distinguished position. This concert will mark the first time Collage New Music and Cantata Singers have ever appeared on the same program. It only makes sense that this joint concert include music by Donald Sur, a man who rests deep in the spirits of both groups. Three of his most characteristic works, two performed by Collage (including the most maddening riff on “Tea for Two” you’ll ever hear), and one by CS (Donald’s last, poignant creation), are at the heart of the concert. An exquisite song cycle by Yehudi Wyner (who is, we hope, busy composing a new work for the 09/10 CS season), a rambunctious piece by Davey Rakowski, and a new composition by Dalit Warshaw inspired by Irène Némirovsky’s incomplete novel Suite Française are the CNM contributions. The concert closes with two movements from two of Irving Fine’s most brilliant and moving cycles for chorus, one a capella, and one for chorus and instrumental ensemble. The Britten Season 2008-2009 Friday, November 7, 8:00 pm – New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall Benjamin Britten Hymn to the Virgin Nicholas Maw One Foot in Eden Still, I Stand First Boston performance Britten Cantata misericordium Rockland Osgood, tenor David Kravitz, bass Gabriel Fauré Requiem Megan Beltran, soprano Mark Andrew Cleveland, bass Pre-concert speaker: John Ehrlich The luminous unaccompanied Hymn to the Virgin, launches our Britten season. This hymn, the earliest of his music we will hear this year, is paired with his Cantata misericordium, the one piece of Britten’s CS has performed in the past. In fact, this music that he composed to honor the founding of the Red Cross is so beautiful, moving and pertinent that this will be the third time it has become part of our season. Nicholas Maw (b. 1935), one of the three or four most important British composers living today (though he now lives in Maryland), composes music of great variety, from his grand and complex Odyssey (renown at the very least for being perhaps the longest purely orchestral work ever composed), to choral music deeply seated in the English anthem tradition. “One Foot in Eden,” born of that venerable world, but with an unusual adventurousness that carries real weight of feeling, is absolutely exquisite. The Fauré Requiem – what can we say about this sublime music? The Requiem hasn’t been on our Jordan concerts since we paired it with Stravinsky’s acerbic Threni. Its comfort is always welcome, and in the generous company of Britten, quite different facets of this music that ascends on the wings of angels are bound to be revealed. Sunday, November 23, 2008, 3:00 p.m.—Longy School of Music, Cambridge At the heart of Britten’s music was always the singing voice, and his enormous output of songs is unmatched in seriousness, literary sophistication, musical imagination and depth of feeling by any since Schubert’s. No one concert of Britten’s songs could give a thorough picture, but neither can one fail to capture the imagination, especially when Allison Voth lends her brilliant and unusual sensibilities to the effort. Friday, January 16, 8:00 pm – Jordan Hall Pre-concert speaker: David Hoose All-Mozart concerts appear without raising an eyebrow. But an all-Britten concert might inspire the question – is he really that worthy? Yes! Five of Britten’s most captivating and potent works, spanning more than three decades of intense creativity, each revealing a different face of this composer whom the Daily Telegraph called, in his obituary, “the truly towering talent of his age,” promise a rich and varied feast. Hans Keller: “This is not the time, and I am not the man, to decide about the relative greatness of Mozart and Britten; to assess how far with Britten, too, “the world-spirit wishes to show that here is pure sound, conforming to the weightless cosmos, triumphant over all chaotic earthliness, spirit of the world-spirit” [a quotation from Einstein]; but as one who is soaked in the music of both Mozart and Britten I may be allowed to claim that for the first time Mozart, the universal musician who masters everything with a somnambulistic surefootedness and grace, has found a companion. It follows that I regard Britten as the greatest of all contemporary composers whose music I understand.” Saturday, February 7, 2 pm — All Saints Parish, Brookline Britten was the twentieth century’s greatest opera composer. His opera Noye’s Fludde, really a musical pageant, grabs young and not with its childlike impatience and optimism, and with its adult understanding. It’s filled with magical invention. Imogen Holst (the daughter of Gustav) wrote that Britten “had the idea of hitting teacups with teaspoons to represent the sound of the first raindrops falling on the ark, but he came round to me one afternoon saying that he’d tried it out at tea-time and it wouldn’t work. By great fortune I had once had to teach Women’s Institute percussion groups during a wartime ‘social half hour,’ so I was able to take him into my kitchen and show him how a row of china mugs hanging on a length of string could be hit with a large wooden spoon.” Friday, March 13, 8:00 pm – Jordan Hall Pre-concert speaker: Andrew Clark I remember turning on the car radio some years ago to come onto what was obviously a live performance of the Beethoven Mass in C. The more I listened the more interested I became, and I had to sit in the car until the end to find out who was performing. At one time, the Mass in C had been a piece I thought little of, especially in the shade of Missa Solemnis. But in that performance it seemed the most urgent, fresh and compelling work imaginable. My surprise that the performance on the radio was by Cantata Singers was filled with joy–and then by a wonder whether we could ever do that well again! We’ve all grown a lot, I assume, so now it’s time to reopen this gracious, optimistic score. By contrast, Britten’s last opera, based on Thomas Mann’s novel, is a disturbing affair, and it is the composer at his most intensely restrained. After he died, his musical assistant Colin Matthews devised an orchestral suite from the opera’s powerful musical material, gorgeously cool and dark music. Gerald Finzi (1901-1956), whose musichas never appeared on our concerts, composed music of profound simplicity and expression, and his Lo, the Full, Final Sacrifice responds to the Britten with serene nobility. Sunday, April 26, 3 pm – Roxbury Community College Several years ago, our collaborative performance of Britten’s touching children’s opera, The Little Sweep, was a great hit. This year we revive it in a series of performances that will bring it to hundreds of school children in the Boston area. Friday, May 8, 8:00 pm – Jordan Hall Pre-concert speaker: Andy Vores Benjamin Britten was one of the most influential proponents of music by and for young people, and he composed music for children both to perform and to enjoy, music that amazingly avoids even a hint of condescension. So, the pairing of this composer and Cantata Singers for its season finale is especially telling, since this year we celebrate the fifteenth year of our flagship education program Classroom Cantatas. We celebrate this milestone by bringing its fruits to the Cantata Singers Jordan Hall series, where participating students and the Boston Children’s Chorus will perform one of their freshly minted cantatas. BCC will also perform Britten’s vivacious setting for young voices of Psalm 150. On the same program, Cantata Singers will present a newly commissioned composition by Andy Vores (of World Wheel fame), based on the same text the children will set in their cantata. After one season’s absence, J.S. Bach returns with a thrilling cantata for St. Michael’s Day, “The voice of rejoicing and salvation is in the tabernacles of the righteous.” This concert and the season close with Britten’s The Company of Heaven, a radio drama of poetry and music composed in 1937. This early work concludes with a noble statement of the hymn “Ye watchers and ye holy ones” that questions in a way that requires no answer.
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