Cantabile Chorale

Songs of Love and Liturgy

by Sanford Dole, artistic director

In the last issue of C-Notes, I spoke of how I had formulated the plans for Cantabile Chorale’s Christmas concert over many years and how my dreams of making a recording of that repertoire were coming to fruition. Now I have more good news. The concerts were a huge success. What’s more, the recording sessions came off without a hitch. In fact, our singers are to be commended for their professionalism and valor in giving their all during the long, exhausting evenings of recording just before Christmas. As I write this in late January, the editing process has begun, and I can report that our first commercial recording is going to be thrilling.

While the December program presented a smorgasbord of works by 18 different Renaissance and contemporary composers, we focus the spotlight now on just three composers, each a preeminent master of his time and place, for our program entitled Songs of Love and Liturgy to be performed on March 11, 12 and 13 in San Francisco, Palo Alto and Berkeley. We look forward to seeing you there.

The first half of the program is devoted to the music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, a towering figure of the 16th century on a par with Lassus and Byrd. After working his way up through several posts, Palestrina spent his last 23 years in the most prestigious position for a musician in the Renaissance world, maestro di cappella at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Perhaps best known for his 104 masses, he also wrote many other liturgical works as well as secular madrigals. Our program selects 16 motets from his Canticum canticorum, or The Song of Songs, a cycle of 29 motets on texts from the biblical book of love poetry of the same name. These gems show Palestrina’s mastery of the strict style of diatonic counterpoint that was the ideal for Renaissance choral music and has been known ever since as the Palestrina style.

After intermission, you will hear another large work, only from a modern master, Einojuhani Rautavaara, the most renowned living composer in Finland. The Helsinki Festival and the Orthodox Church of Finland commissioned him in 1971 to create his Vigilia, or All-Night Vigil, the first setting in Finnish of that Orthodox divine service. You may recognize some texts from having heard their Slavonic counterparts in the Rachmaninoff All-Night Vigil we presented last season. Rautavaara’s a cappella masterpiece comprises both Vespers and Matins, and we will perform the Vespers portion, 14 movements of lush harmonies in a vast diversity of textures for chorus and soloists, including Russian basso Nikolai Massenkoff. Joshua Habermann, a familiar name to many in the Bay Area music scene, happens to be a scholar of Rautavaara’s choral music and will present a preview lecture before each of the March concerts.

We continue our cycle of the motets of Johann Sebastian Bach and conclude the March program with Bach’s Motet VI, Lobet den Herrn, alle Heiden, or Praise the Lord, All Ye Nations, in which the great master of the Baroque era displays his adept handling of counterpoint in one delightful fugue after another. This jewel is a real blast to sing and is sure to send you off into the evening with joy in your heart.

Cantabile Choral Guild
953 Industrial Avenue, Suite 122, Palo Alto CA 94303
650.424.1410 info@cantabile.org