Antonio Bertali's Missa Resurrectionis

Event time: 
Monday, December 5, 2005 - 3:00pm
Event description: 

 

Antonio Bertali (1605-69) 

Missa Resurrectionis

 

Yale Schola Cantorum, Spiritus Collective, and Yale Collegium Players

Simon Carrington, conductor   Robert Mealy, director and solo violin

 

Monday, December 5 | 8pm.
St. Mary’s Church, 5 Hillhouse Ave, New Haven.

 

Tuesday, December 6 | 8pm.
St. Michael’s Church, 225 W. 99th St., New York.

 

Both concerts will be preceeded by a talk by Brian Clark at 7pm.

Both events are free and open to the public - no tickets required.


 

Yale Schola Cantorum, the University’s specialist chamber choir directed by Simon Carrington, will give the first performance in modern times of a glorious baroque masterpiece by Antonio Bertali, a great Italian composer active in Vienna in the seventeenth century. This is the second in a series of outstanding unknown works edited by Brian Clark for Yale Schola Cantorum.

There will be two performances of the work, the first in New Haven on Monday, December 5 at 8 pm at St. Mary’s Church, 5 Hillhouse Ave. It will be repeated on Tuesday, December 6 at 8 pm in New York at St. Michael’s Church, 225 W. 99th St. Vocal soloists are drawn from the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale School of Music graduate voice program in oratorio, early music, song, and chamber ensemble.

2005 marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of Antonio Bertali, Kapellmeister to the Imperial Viennese court from 1649 until his death in 1669. Yale Schola Cantorum, Spiritus Collective, and Yale Collegium Players will mark the occasion with a performance of the composer’s 1666 Missa Resurrectionis, a sumptuously scored piece typical of the composer’s larger works. Eight soloists are joined by eight-part choir, five-part strings, two trumpets and five trombones with continuo. The Missa Resurrectionis is not only a striking piece of liturgical work, but a precious musical gem in the late 17th-century Hapsburg crown. These concerts are a very rare opportunity to hear Bertali’s church music.

In addition to the mass and sonatas by Bertali, two motets by Christian Geist (c. 1650-1711), a German composer and organist active in Scandinavia, will be performed, as well as two instrumental sonatas by the Kromeriz Kapellmeister Pavel Vejvanovsky.

Both concerts, presented by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, are free and open to the public.