Location: Christ Church Episcopal
84 Broadway
New Haven, CT 06511
Admission: Free
Open to: General Public
Description: Simon Carrington, guest conductor, Music of Palestrina, Stucky, and Vivaldi
Simon Carrington, the founding conductor of Yale Schola Cantorum, returns this year to conduct a program entitled The Face of Heaven So Fine, a reference to Juliet’s eulogy to Romeo in Shakespeare’s play, and quoted by Steven Stucky in his composition for choir and nine instruments Take Him, Earth: In Memoriam John F. Kennedy that forms the centerpiece of the program.
The program will open and close with rarely performed Italian masterpieces. Carrington writes:
“Vivaldi’s Dixit Dominus was long thought to be by his younger contemporary Baldassarre Galuppi. Ten or so years after Vivaldi’s death the somewhat unscrupulous owner of a Venetian music copying house slipped the score of this magnificent work into a set of pieces by Galuppi when dispatching them to the Saxon court in Dresden which was updating its repertoire of sacred vocal music. The composer’s proper identity was finally revealed in 2005 by an Australian musicologist and tonight’s performing edition was subsequently prepared by my Cambridge contemporary Michael Talbot.
Palestrina’s Mass, Missa Ave Maria in 6, 7, and 8 parts is a late work which appeared in print two years after his death but fortunately correctly attributed. I will have the great pleasure of conducting this marvelous work with Schola Cantorum again next year at the Ascension Day Mass in the church of Santissima Trinitá dei Pellegrini in Rome.”
Program:
- Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina: Missa Ave Maria in 6, 7, & 8 parts
- Steven Stucky: Take Him, Earth
- Antonio Vivaldi: Dixit Dominus