Sacred Masterworks
Sunday, November 20, 2011, 3:00 pm
Church of the Covenant
67 Newbury St., Boston
Tickets: $18/$28/$38
Read an interview with Coro Allegro Artistic Director David Hodgkins about this exciting concert
Come hear Coro Allegro launch its 2011-2012 season with two beloved 20th-century sacred masterpieces by Morten Lauridsen and Leonard Bernstein!
In each half of the concert, we link a cappella music of the late Renaissance with orchestrated music of today across two languages. The first half, sung in Latin, begins with the delicately luminous O Magnum Mysterium by Palestrina. Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna, a lush and uplifting requiem written for the composer’s mother, follows. The second half pairs settings of Hebrew psalms by two Jewish composers: Salamon Rossi, a contemporary of Monteverdi, and Leonard Bernstein, whose Chichester Psalms, closes the program with its tripping rhythms and sheer joy.
Joining Coro for the Chichester Psalms is boy soprano soloist Matthew Bridgeman, a 7th grader at John Glenn Middle School and a member of the Boston Children’s Chorus. Susan DeSelms, music director of Brookline's United Parish Church, is featured on organ for the Bernstein and the Lauridsen pieces, continuing the collaboration begun last spring with the wildly successful joint performance of the oratorio The Son of Man.
“[Lux Aeterna] is a classic of new American choral writing. In this light-filled continuum of sacred texts, old world structures and new world spirit intertwine in a cunningly written score, at once sensuous and spare.”
--Hilary Finch, The London Times
“[The Chichester Psalms is] just about the most tonally optimistic work [Bernstein] composed, and in the simplicity and sentimentality of the Hebrew psalm settings, one of his most approachable yet still exhilarating scores.”
--Andrew McGregor, BBC Music
