Location: Sprague Memorial Hall
470 College Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Open To: General Public
Admission: Free
Description: Ecstatic Meditations. A Concert of the Yale Schola Cantorum
- April 27, 8pm. | Christ Church, New Haven
- April 29, 7:30pm. | Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Boston, MA.
Yale Schola Cantorum, the University’s acclaimed chamber choir directed by Simon Carrington, will perform Pierre de Manchicourt’s Missa Veni Sancte Spiritus (early 16th century) and Aaron Jay Kernis’s Ecstatic Meditations (1998), both a cappella choral masterworks. Soloists will be drawn from Yale’s recently established graduate voice program in
early music. There will be two performances of the works, the first in New Haven on Wednesday, April 27 at 8 pm at Christ Church (84 Broadway at Elm). It will be repeated on Friday, April 29 at 7:30 pm in Boston at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul (138 Tremont St.).
The April 29 concert marks the Boston debut of the choir, and Carrington’s first return conducting engagement in Boston since his departure in 2003 after two critically-acclaimed seasons as Director of Choral Activities at the New England Conservatory.
The concert will juxtapose the two works, interweaving a magnificent polyphonic mass from the early Renaissance with one of the finest sets of part-songs from the late twentieth-century: a feast of unaccompanied choral music for chamber choir.
Although today he remains relatively obscure, the composer Pierre de Manchicourt was a passionate eccentric with a penchant for harmonically daring counterpoint. His remarkable music combines the elegance and craft of Flemish polyphony with the burning brightness and passion of the south and his Missa Veni Sancte Spiritus for six voice parts is one of his most powerful and dramatic works, a glorious foil for the twentieth century works to be woven between the movements.
The concert takes its name from the work by Aaron Jay Kernis, one of the youngest composers ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Kernis has become among the most esteemed musical figures of his generation, and has written works for many of America’s foremost musical institutions and artists, including the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Christopher O’Riley, Renée Fleming, Pamela Frank and many others. He serves on the faculty of the Yale School of Music.