A Celebration of Spring in Words and Music
Christ Church Episcopal, New Haven (84 Broadway at Elm)
Yale Schola Cantorum, Simon Carrington, conductor
Thomas Murray with Alistair Nelson, organ
Rev. Thomas Troeger, presider
Free and Open to the Public. No tickets required.
Poems and prayers first sung in ancient times have been transfigured through the centuries by composers using richly varied musical idioms. Yale Schola Cantorum, directed by Simon Carrington; and Thomas Murray, organist, will perform some of this music in the context of a simple service of evening prayer celebrating the season of the earth’s transfiguration from Winter to Spring, from death to life. Rev. Thomas Troeger, Edward and Ruth Cox Lantz Professor of Christian Communication at Yale, will preside.
The Yale Schola Cantorum, now in its third year, is a 24-voice chamber choir specializing in music before 1750 and from the last hundred years. Simon Carrington is the group’s founder and conductor; it is supported by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music with the School of Music.
The program includes music ranging from Psalm settings to a song written for “A Garland for Linda,” a musical tribute to Sir Paul McCartney’s wife who died of cancer in 1998. The selections span more than half a millennium: from Adrian Willaert and Thomas Tallis in the sixteenth century, to William Albright and Richard Rodney Bennett in the twentieth, and Yale visiting composer Tarik O’Regan and graduate student composer Zachary Wadsworth in the twenty-first.
Thomas Murray, University Organist, will perform on the new Lively-Fulcher organ, joining his student Alistair Nelson to provide accompaniment for William Albright’s David’s Songs.