Serenade to music


Sometimes we forget that it's the music that really matters. To remind us here is a photo I took recently in L'Eglise Saint-Pierre in Commequiers in south-western France. The Ensemble Vocal de la Cathédrale de Nantes directed by Louis-Marie Burgevin with organist Nicolas Daviaud (check out details of that beautiful new French classical style organ here) were performing the exquisitely balanced programme below. But I was in deepest rural France for a specific reason, find out why later this week.

Ave Maria - gregorian
Ave Maria - Tomás Luis de Victoria
Beata Virgo - William Byrd
Ave Maris Stella - manuscript of Limoges
Stabat Mater - Zoltán Kodály
Tota Pulchra - Pau Casals
Salve Montserratina - Pau Casals

Magnificat - anonymous
Concerto in E - Vivaldi/Walther (organ)
Credo - Vivaldi

Now read about a Bach chorale's secret French connection.
Photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Comments

Pliable said…
Elgar's The Music Makers is not his finest work. It sets for contralto, chorus and orchestra the poem by Arthur O'Shaughessy (1844-1881), a friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti who worked in the British Museum as a zoologist.

O'Shaughessy's poem is a typically Victorian mixture of heroic optmism and nostalgia that you would think only an English gentleman could set to music.

But the Hungarian Kodály also composed a setting of the poem. It was written in 1964 for chorus and orchestra and was, I believe, to a commission from Merton College Choir, Oxford.

http://www.classicalarchives.com/bios/codm/kodaly.html
2:17 pm
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