New year, new music list

The music list for January-March is now available here.

Our Cardoso450 project continues throughout most of 2017 and rather dominates this music list. We’ve only just celebrated Christmas, yet it seems only a matter of weeks before Lent is upon us once more. Lent/Easter marks the final period of concentrated activity on the project before it concludes in November. All of the Cardoso450 works are being newly edited and it is a continuing joy to discover these largely unknown works. (The sheer amount of music being edited and added to our library is extraordinary – in 2016 we sang 61 services and added 124 new editions to the library, including 101 for Cardoso450!)

Beyond Cardoso, two double-choir settings of the Marian antiphon Ave Regina cælorum particularly stand out: the setting by Joan Cererols is notable for the effortless conversing of the two choirs and for its stunning concluding English cadence; and Michael Haydn’s setting, written in the stile antico, which contains numerous harmonic twists and turns that make it a happy partner to Mendelssohn’s Mass for eight voices, an arrangement of his vernacular Lutheran settings.

Cardoso Concert

We had a wonderful time performing our Cardoso & The Golden Age programme on Thursday 8th to an appreciative and attentive audience. Thank you to everyone who joined us. We will be sharing some photos and videos soon; in the meantime you can find out a bit more about the pieces we performed and their composers by reading the concert programme. 

The celebration of Cardoso's 450th anniversary continues tomorrow; Sunday 11th December 2016 is the 450th anniversary of Cardoso's baptism (and his likely birthday). Mass at 11.00am will feature his Missa Dominicarum Adventus and the motet Cum audisset Ioannes alongside the 8-part Alma Redemptoris Mater by Duarte Lobo.

 

Cardoso & The Golden Age: Programme

Our concert marking the 450th anniversary of the birth of the Carmelite composer Frei Manuel Cardoso is now just a week away. 

To whittle down a project of nearly 200 performed works taken from the 300 or so catalogued has been a challenging task! While focusing on Cardoso, the programme sees the other major composers active at the time of Cardoso represented. It features some well-known works, including Cardoso Sitivit anima mea and Rebelo Panis angelicus, but for the most part continues the work of our Cardoso450 project in promoting works which are unknown. Some of the works have been or will be presented liturgically at the Carmelite Priory, but a choice few are extra and can only be heard at our concert.

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Kyrie-Christe-Christe-Kyrie

The Masses of Cardoso and his Portuguese contemporaries follow an interesting pattern in their Kyries, providing two distinct polyphonic settings of the Christe. This Kyrie–Christe–Christe–Kyrie sequence is only exceptionally found in the Spanish and Roman etc. schools, but was standard on the Iberian Peninsula in the 16th and early 17th centuries. What is the significance of this and how does it affect our approach to performance?

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