Volume9, Issue2

Christmas at San Marco
Sanford Dole conducts inaugural concert

        Celebrate the season by attending Baroque Choral Guild's festive "Christmas at San Marco." Director Sanford Dole conducts his first concerts with the Guild on December 9 and 10 in Palo Alto and Berkeley.
        "For my first outing with the Baroque Choral Guild, I am delighted to be presenting a program of musical gems from the Italian Renaissance," says Mr. Dole. "All of the works in the concert were written by the compositional all-stars of their day, men who rose to the very pinnacle of their profession at St. Mark's in Venice."
        The Guild Chorus will perform music of Monteverdi and the Gabrielis (the famous Giovanni and his uncle Andrea), names which are immediately associated with Venetian music. Also featured will be works by composers who, although lesser known today, enjoyed great celebrity in 16th century Venice.
The Venetian style
        The basilica of San Marco was the center of Venetian musical life. The acous-tic properties of the building itself, with its various domes and galleries, provided opportunity for antiphonal effects and divided groups, called cori spezzati.
        The culture reflected the Venetian government's practice of linking feast days to historical or political events. In all, 40 special days were dedicated each year for elaborate public celebration, and of course these ceremonies required music. Venetian composers had to be experts in the genres of pomp and splendor.
        The December concert is a program of rich and colorful works, featuring poly-choral music for up to fourteen parts.
The grandiose and the simple
        The concert opens with Giovanni Gabrieli's grand 14-part "Exultet jam angelica turba."   As was the practice, Gabrieli consciously exploited contrasts and sonorities by using cornetts to expand the highest ranges and trombones to double the lowest vocal lines.
        The concert continues with Claudio Monteverdi's Missa "In illo tempore," a beautifully simple and concise mass written for four parts (SATB).
        Interspersed between sections of the
mass will be motets by Giovanni Bassano, Gioseffe Zarlino, and Giovanni Croce; also a Giovanni Gabrieli Canzon for instruments only.
        Bassano, a contemporary of Giovanni Gabrieli, was a celebrated cornetto player who served as head of San Marco's instru-mental ensemble. The Guild will perform his "Dic nobis Maria" for six parts, high voices in conversation with low. Zarlino, who also served as maestro di cappella of San Marco (while Andrea Gabri-eli held the post of Second Organist) composed "Nigra sum" for five parts. In the Guild's per-formance trombones will double the lower voices. Croce was a student of Zarlino and succeeded him as maestro di cappella. The Guild will perform two pieces by him; the first of which,"O sacrum convivium" is a conservative 4-part a cappella motet.
Staging challenge
        The second half of the program provides a challenge as the choristers per-form music that ranges from simple 4-part SATB to 12-part triple-choruses.   At least our singers will not have to scramble up nar-row staircases in order to situate them-selves in lofty stone galleries all over the church! The second half opens with Giovanni Gabrieli's heraldic "Hodie Christus natus est," for double chorus of voices with brass and continuo. Next the chorus performs "Salvator noster, dilectissimi," a 5-part motet, with brass doubling, by Claudio Merulo, who served as First Organist of San Marco and was Andrea Gabrieli's imme-diate predecessor in that post.
        The Guild will then perform the second Croce piece on the program, "Buccinate," written in typically florid Venetian cori spezzatii style and doubled by brass. It is followed by another work by Bassano, his spirited double-chorus "Hodie."
        In contrast to the colorful polychoral pieces, the chorus will perform a sublime 4-part a cappella "O magnum mysterium" by Adrien Willaert. We include the Flem-ish Willaert in this Venetian program because he was the first permanentmaestro di cappella of San Marco (appointed in 1527) and the one who established Venice as a great European music center.
        The concert's closing work will be Andrea Gabrieli, pupil of Willaert and uncle of Giovanni. While not as famous as his nephew, Andrea was a master of ceremonial church music. His "Magnificat" is a fitting grand finale of this concert - a triple-chorus work that employs all our
musical forces.

Volume 9, Issue 2

Baroque Choral Guild, 953 Industrial Ave. Ste 118, Palo Alto CA 94303, 650.424.1410