Événement

ATTENDE DOMINE: Music for Lent & Holy Week

THIS YEAR'S PALM SUNDAY CONCERT will include penitential works by Bruckner, Byrd, Casals, Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Poulenc and Victoria. The bulk of the program will be taken from collections for Holy
Week by Victoria, Gesualdo and Poulenc:

The Lamentations for Good Friday from Victoria's Hebdomada Sanctæ (1585) are sublime examples of Victoria's mystical fervor and the nobility of his musical concepts. It has been said that Palestrina's classical purity of style proclaimed him the Raphael of music. It would be equally true that the burning ardor of Victoria's compositions
made him music's El Greco. This comparison is particularly evident in his highly colored music for the Office of Tenebræ.

Carlo Gesualdo was Prince of Venosa and a progressive Renaissance composer. His Responsoria Sabbato Sancto (1611) are harmonically striking, to say the least. Gesualdo's unusual harmonic vocabulary was used as a means of heightening expression in already vivid verbal texts such as these from Holy Week.

Quatre motets pour un temps de penitence are sacred works by contemporary French composer Francis Poulenc (18991963). One writer describes these Tenebræ settings in
terms of "an enticement of sound that is an act of faith in itself."

Other motets featured on the Palm Sunday program will be William Byrd's Ne irascaris, Anton Bruckner's Christus factus est, Pablo Casals' O vos omnes and Claudio
Monteverdi's Domine, ne in furore tuo arguas me.