Location: Woolsey Hall
500 College Street
New Haven, CT
Admission: Free
Open To: General Public
Description: Music for Palm Sunday. Yale Camerata singing Music of Lang and Britten, Marguerite L. Brooks, conductor
Featuring:
- James Taylor, tenor
- Thomas Murray, organ
- Elm City Girls Choir, Rebecca Rosenbaum, director
- solists from the Trinity Choir of Men and Boys, Walden Moore, director
- John Corkhill and James Deitz, percussion
- Douglas Dickson and Erika Schroth, piano
On the program is David Lang’s little match girl passion, a work for chamber chorus and percussion based on the Hans Christian Andersen story the Little Match Girl, a story told, as Lang says, “as a kind of parable, drawing a religious and moral equivalency between the suffering of the poor girl and the suffering of Jesus.” Lang explores this analogy by recasting Andersen’t tale in the format of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.
The other piece on the program is Benjamin Britten’s Saint Nicolas, a cantata written in 1948 for the centennial celebration of Lansing College in Sussex. Writing specifically for the resources available to him on this occasion, Britten scored the piece for mixed choir, tenor soloist, three or four boys, strings, piano duet, organ, and percussion. It is the composer’s first professional work intended for combinations of professional and amateur musicians.
On this occasion Yale faculty James Taylor, tenor, and University Organist Thomas Murray will perform with the Yale Camerata; The Elm City Girls Choir, directed by Rebecca Rosenbaum; soloists from the Trinity Choir of Men and Boys, directed by Walden Moore; Douglas Dickson and Erika Schroth, piano; and percussionists John Corkhill and James Deitz.