7:30pm Sunday 12 June 2022
St Oswald’s Church
The main work in the Festival Choir’s final concert of the 2021-2022 Season is the sunny and tuneful Mass in D that Dvořák wrote in 1887 for a friend who had built a new chapel at his chateau in Lužany. The original was for a small choir with organ and the Festival Choir will perform this with Ian Chesworth accompanying the church pipe organ. A Catholic, Dvořák set the Latin texts, and produced a very flexible work with optional solos which will be performed by Choir members. His usual publisher Simrock showed no interest in it, so the composer, knowing of the unique English amateur choral tradition, approached Novello in London. They agreed to publish it as long as the composer made an orchestral arrangement of the organ part. The work immediately became very popular in Britain, as did the composer who, after many performances of his music by leading musicians, was invited to receive an honorary degree at Cambridge University where his Eighth Symphony was performed in the Senate House. This was all before the composer’s exceptionally well paid two year residency in the USA, where he incorporated North American folk and indigenous melodies into his New World Symphony and the “American” String Quartet to inspire American composers to do likewise, while pining for his large family and the forests of his homeland. The first half of the concert features music by composers who like Dvořák were born in what is now the Czech Republic, across three centuries when Czech and German culture flourished simultaneously in a land ruled mainly by German aristocrats. The opening work is the extraordinary and powerful Requiem in F minor by Heinrich Biber. One of the most influential and distinctive composers of the Baroque age, this Requiem, which the Choir first performed in the concert “Catching at Hope” to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of World War One, condenses all the lamentation, consolation and hope of a requiem into a mere 15 minutes. Short songs and instrumental numbers follow, performed by Choir members with Rosalind Hall accompanying. These range from a choral hymn by the early Baroque composer Adan Michna z Otradovic to a song and a piano solo by the 20th century composer Vítězslava Kaprálová who studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris before her untimely death aged only 25. There’s a setting of Qui Tollis for alto with clarinet obbligato form a mass by J S Bach’s contemporary Jan Zelenka; one of Dvořák’s Biblical Songs; and Moravian folk songs arranged for flute by Leoš Janáček, composer of the dazzling Sinfonietta and the operas The Cunning Little Vixen and Jenůfa. Ian will play organ music by Janáček and by Bohuslav Černohorský, another of Bach’s contemporaries
Concert Tickets: £10 (£3 for 18s and under) 01625 575554
Please note that there will be Interval refreshments (tea and coffee) with donations welcome; a raffle with tickets costing £1. Please note that only cash or cheques can be accepted at St Oswald’s