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Next Concert

CC21's next concert, Masterpieces of the English & Italian Renaissance, is on Saturday 17 July 2010, in Hampstead Parish Church.

Masterpieces of the English & Italian Renaissance

This will be the première of Hugh Keyte’s radical newly-published edition of Spem. All the other modern editions are based on an anonymous 18th-century antiquarian’s unsystematic restoration of the Latin text (using the earliest surviving source, which has a substitute English text devised for the performance at the 1604 Creation Banquet of Prince Henry, eldest son of James I). The new edition reverses the process of automatic phrase-by-phrase substitution that allowed the original copyist of the 17th-century score and parts to operate on automatic pilot. The result gets much closer to what Tallis wrote, getting rid of all kinds of anomalies and rewritten rhythms and revealing a vital, previously unsuspected symbolic aspect.

Here is the full list of the works on offer at this concert:

  • PALESTRINA - O Gloriosa Domina (triple choir)
  • STRIGGIO - Ecce beatam lucem (40-part motet)
  • TALLIS - Evening Hymn (‘Tallis’s Canon’ in its unfamiliar ur-version)
  • TALLIS - Gaude, gloriosa Dei Mater (summation of the Eton Choir Book tradition of Marian votive antiphons)
  • BENEVOLI - Regna Terrae (first British performance of a virtuosic Ascension Day mass proper for 12 solo sopranos)
  • BENEVOLI - Gloria (from a four-choir mass of 1660, also composed for the pre-eminent Julian Choir of St. Peter’s, of which Benevoli was the outstanding 17th-century maestro.   It features an extravagant example of jenny restraint*)
  • TALLIS - Why Fum’th in sight (the one that inspired Vaughan Williams’ Tallis Fantasia.)
  • SARUM PLAINCHANT - Spem in alium
  • TALLIS - Spem in alium (the familiar 40-part motet, in a radical new edition.)

The liturgical text paraphrases the prayers of the Hebrew heroine Judith as she prepares to decapitate the Assyrian invader Holofernes. Hugh is convinced that the motet was commissioned by the Ridolfi plotters (Catholic recusants, would-be assassins of Elizabeth I) for performance at a ceremony of self-dedication in which it followed a performance of a Judith-and-Holofernes drama. The venue was not, as has been thought, the long gallery of Arundel House (off the Strand) but the double-height early-sixteenth-century Thames-side banqueting house in which the long gallery terminated, with an internal gallery around which the Spem performers were disposed. We will be arranging our singers in Hampstead Parish Church accordingly.

*TENERE LA MULA – REINING IN THE JENNY!

The jenny (female mule) was the preferred mode of transport of senior clergy in 17th-century Rome. The jenny is given to occasional fits of exuberance, and a Prince of the Church might not infrequently have been observed careering through the streets while trying to rein in his steed: in the popular expression, tenere la mula.

Composers of the Roman “Colossal Baroque” School of polychoral church music unkindly commandeered the expression for a striking new device by which they brought mTenere La Mulaany a Gloria, Credo and Magnificat to an earth-shaking climax. A prime example is in the Gloriaof Orazio Benevoli’s four-part Missa Si Deus Pro Nobis Quis Contra Nos. At the words “in Gloria Dei Patris” the sopranos of all four choirs take up the reins, launching into a great unison plainchant cantus firmus that rises inexorably to stratospheric heights. Beneath this the unruly lower voices represent the bolting jenny, tossing brief, quick-fire phrases on to the other at random. As always (in music, at least) restraint triumphs, with the sopranosforcing the lower voices back to a walking pace and all sixteen parts uniting in a vast, crunching cadence.

Come and hear it for yourself!

Tickets are £12 (concessions £10), and are available on the door. You can book advanced tickets by calling Richard Lea on 0208 675 4881, or emailing him on: leasdornton@hotmail.com. To be added to our mailing list, please email us, or call us on 0208 785 4537.