Celebration of Four Masters
Yale Camerata, Glee Club, Schola Cantorum, Voxtet, and Philharmonia
FREE
Nicholas McGegan, acclaimed by The New Yorker as “an expert in eighteenth-century style,” will conduct choral and orchestral works of Haydn, Mendelssohn, and Handel on Sunday, March 1, 2009 at 4 pm in Woolsey Hall. The concert is a “Celebration of Four Masters”— a reference to McGegan and the three featured composers — and coincides with the 250th anniversary of Handel’s death and the 200th anniversary of Mendelssohn’s birth and Haydn’s death. McGegan will conduct the Yale Philharmonia (Shinik Hahm, music director) and Yale Collegium Players (Robert Mealy, director) in Haydn’s Symphony No. 103, “Drum Roll,” and a selection of works for chorus and orchestra: Haydn’s Te Deum in C and Der Sturm with the Yale Camerata (Marguerite Brooks, director); Mendelssohn’s Verleih uns Frieden and Hear My Prayer with the Yale Glee Club (Jeffrey Douma, director); Haydn’s Salve regina with the Yale Voxtet (James Taylor, director); and Handel’s As Pants the Hart and Te Deum in A with the Yale Schola Cantorum (Simon Carrington, director). The program concludes with the combined choruses and instrumentalists in Handel’s “Hallelujah” Chorus from Messiah.
Acclaimed by the Glasgow Herald as “a wizard who can make music soar in apparent defiance of gravity,” Nicholas McGegan has been the music director of San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO) for more than twenty years, and since 1991 the artistic director of Germany’s International Händel-Festival at Göttingen. Mr. McGegan is an active recording artist, with an extensive discography with the PBO and other performing groups, including the Göttingen Festival Opera and Orchestra and the Arcadian Academy. Mr. McGegan’s world-premiere recording of Handel’s Susanna earned a Gramophone Award. His most recent recordings include music by Händel and Mendelssohn for Carus; Romanza, featuring works of Hummel, Lachner and Weber; and Händel’s Atalanta and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, both with PBO.
The concert is a presentation of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Yale School of Music, and the Yale Glee Club. Admission is free. For more information, visit www.yale.edu/music, or call 203-432-4158.