Bay Choral Guild's 31st Subscription Season 2009-2010

See also our full-color season brochure (1.2MB).

Our concert year opens with an all-Baroque program, including vocal soloists and an orchestra of period instruments, with soloists and orchestra underwritten in part by a grant from Steve Kispersky. Bay Choral Guild (then the Baroque Choral Guild) sang Handel’s Dixit Dominus in our very first season, 1988-89. Thirty-one years later, we reprise this delightfully quirky piece, a favorite with choirs and audiences worldwide. Next, in a nice coincidence, we celebrate the feast day (November 22) of the patron saint of music with the renowned but too seldom performed Messa di Santa Cecilia of Alessandro Scarlatti. Finally, Beatus vir, a dramatic setting of Psalm 112 by Claudio Monteverdi, rounds out a joyful and festive concert!

The solemnity of Lent and the contemplation of human mortality have often inspired music imbued with deep emotion and exquisite beauty. Two prime examples by contemporaries at the close of the Renaissance—the director of a Portuguese seminary and a guilt-ridden Italian prince—are Lôbo’s Requiem and the Tenebrae of Gesualdo. Both display elaborate counterpoint but in utterly different harmonic language. For further contrast, we sing a set of beautifully lyric motets by the Romantic composer Josef Rheinberger from tiny Liechtenstein.We finish this extraordinary a cappella concert with works by two living composers: England’s John Tavener and the Bay Area’s own Frank Ferko.

During the past decade, BCG has loved performing many of Sanford Dole’s shorter works. In a fitting tribute to Sanford’s tenth anniversary as BCG’s artistic director as well as to our long and fulfilling partnership, BCG performs his new piece celebrating the joy and reverence of music. The Fabric of Peace, a 35-minute cantata for chorus and four-hand piano, is built on texts from disparate sources, from the Rig Veda to the writings of composer William Byrd. For the grand finale to our season of Celebration and Devotion, we serenade you, the audience, the other crucial partner in our music-making, with a choral valentine of love songs—Johannes Brahms’ Liebeslieder Waltzes.

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