Yale Schola Cantorum
Simon Carrington, conductor
Yale Collegium Players
Robert Mealy, director
Chiaroscuro
Venetian Vespers, Savage Altars, Flashing Water
Psalms and motets by Cavalli, Rigatti, Grandi, Monteverdi, Rovetta, Legrenzi
Ingraham Marshall: Savage Altars (1991)
Joan Panetti: To The Flashing Water Say: I Am (2008)
Sprague Memorial Hall, 470 College Street, New Haven
Saturday, November 8, 2008 / 8 pm
Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, 1 West 53rd Street, New York City
Part of Concerts at Saint Thomas Series
Wednesday, November 12, 2008 /7:30 PM
Yale Schola Cantorum, the University’s acclaimed chamber choir directed by Simon Carrington, will continue the Chiaroscuro theme for the fifth year with Venetian Vespers, Savage Altars, Flashing Water, contrasting old and new in dramatic juxtaposition. The concert will take place at 8 pm on Saturday, November 8 in Sprague Memorial Hall in New Haven (470 College St.) It will be repeated in New York at Saint Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue on November 12 at 7:30 pm as part of the Concerts at Saint Thomas Series.
The baroque specialist Brian Clark, who assembled the music for the choir’s highly regarded recordings of the Biber Vespers and the BertaliMissa Resurrectionis, has drawn together a Venetian Vespers sequence with psalms and motets by Monteverdi and his leading contemporaries Rigatti, Grandi and Legrenzi. Schola Cantorum, with soloists from Yale’s voice program in Early Music, Oratorio, Song and Chamber Ensemble led by James Taylor, will be joined by the Yale Collegium Players directed by Robert Mealy. This sequence will be interspersed with two contemporary works by Yale faculty composers for the choir and instrumentalists from the Yale School of Music.
Ingram Marshall’s Savage Altars for choir, soloists, tape, and violin and viola obbligato contrasts the comforting but admonitory words of the Magnificat with the chronicle by the Roman historian Tacitus of the discovery of the remains of massacred Roman soldiers and their enemies’ “savage altars” nearby. The composer creates radiant surfaces but continually probes them, catching the ear off guard. Joan Panetti’s To the Flashing Water say: I am is the second of her pair of Rilke settings for Schola Cantorum and chamber ensemble. An intensely dramatic and expressive nine minute setting for choir and 15 instruments, its notes and characters are so acutely chosen that Ms. Panetti’s language is full of surprises, fresh and personal.
The Chiaroscuro concert is presented by Yale Institute of Sacred Music. The New Haven concert is free; no tickets are required.Tickets to the New York performance are available online at www.saintthomaschurch.org.
More information: www.yale.edu/schola