Location: See below
Open To: General Public
Admission: Free
Performances:
- March 31, 2007, 7:30 pm Grace Episcopal Church, Hartford, CT. The distinguished Buxtehude scholar Kerala Snyder will give a preconcert talk at 7 pm.
- April 1, 2007, 8 pm St. Mary’s Church, New Haven CT, with the preconcert talk at 7:15 pm.
- April 2, 2007, 8 pm - St. Michael’s Church, New York City, preconcert talk at 7:15.
Description: Yale Schola Cantorum Sings Buxtehude Masterpiece
Yale Schola Cantorum, the 24-voice chamber choir directed by Simon Carrington, together with the Yale Collegium Players directed by Robert Mealy, and soloists from the Yale Graduate program in voice led by James Taylor, will mark the tercentenary of the death of Dieterich Buxtehude (ca. 1637-1707) with three performances of the composer’s Membra Jesu Nostri.
Buxtehude was one of the most influential composers in Northern Europe during the seventeenth century. Although best known for his organ works, he also composed a large amount of sacred vocal music. Membra Jesu Nostri is a cycle of seven separate cantatas, each devoted to one of the members of Christ’s crucified body: feet, knees, hands, side, breast, heart, and head. Their texts come from a medieval Latin poem, and Buxtehude’s music is intimate and devotional, eschewing the dramatic style that he himself cultivated in his famous “Abendmusiken” concerts and that became normative for eighteenth-century oratorio-passions. In a seventeenth-century church service these seven cantatas might have been set apart from one another by portions of the liturgy, and so the New Haven performance will also feature interpolations of other music by Buxtehude in a variety of styles, including chorale settings, sonatas for violin, viola da gamba and continuo, and a dramatic setting of the Isaiah text “Surely he has borne our grief.”