A Baroque Christmas Around the World

Program Notes by Sanford Dole

Welcome to another exciting season of the Guild Chorus. We journey this season on “The Grand Tour” to many corners of the globe, crossing back and forth between the musical worlds of early and contemporary styles and between the realms of the sacred and the secular.

Tonight we present music that you have probably never heard before from the late 17th- and early 18th-centuries and from cultural centers in both the Old World and the New. As we had not performed an entire concert of baroque music since Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion in 2000, I thought it would be good to revisit our core repertoire this holiday season. Also, it is part of our stated mission to bring to light pieces of great quality that have somehow not received their due in the modern world. While this music may all be baroque, the aesthetic keeps changing as we move from style to style, and even the sound of the Latin texts shifts to new accents as we travel from country to country.

Perhaps you will agree that nothing could be more satisfying on an all-baroque concert such as this than the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and it is important that our singers be exposed regularly to the artistic and vocal challenges that the master’s music presents in order to keep their “chops” up. Hence, I began looking for one of Bach’s numerous shorter works around which to build a program and eventually settled upon his Missa Brevis in A Major, BWV 234, whose scoring for two flutes, the usual complement of strings, and continuo presented interesting opportunities in selecting other works for the program.

The Missa Brevis dates from the late 1730s but is a parody mass based on movements from pieces that Bach had written in earlier years. Someone well versed in Bach’s over 200 surviving cantatas would recognize music from the cantatas numbered 67, 79, 136, and 179. I find this gem to be as delightfully full of ingenious counterpoint and expressive beauty as any of Bach’s more famous pieces.

Around the time that I was assembling this program, one of my friends was lobbying heavily for more performances of the music of Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Listening to CD’s of the works by this great composer, I became captivated by a Christmas

piece that is not so familiar as his Messe de Minuit, the Christmas Eve mass, and added to our program the oratorio In Nativitatem Domini Canticum, a musical account of the angel’s visit to the shepherds to announce the birth of Christ.

As I was unable to locate a published version of this work, I decided to create my own edition, scoring it for the same flutes and strings as are used in the Bach. Charpentier’s original manuscript, a facsimile of which I viewed at the U.C. Berkeley library, is not entirely clear as to the use of wind instruments but does seem to imply at least one flute. Certainly it was common practice at the time for composers to employ flutes in pastoral music about the idealized shepherds so fashionable at the court of Louis XIV. I hope Charpentier’s intentions come through in my humble rendering of this charming composition.

Noting how different stylistically these pieces by Bach and Charpentier are from each other, I began to think about how to expand this range and explore other parts of the baroque musical landscape. Along with a German and a Frenchman, it made sense to include an Italian composer from the late 1600s or early 1700s.

As I searched lists of works, a rarely performed Christmas motet for unaccompanied double chorus caught my eye, a setting of O magnum mysterium written in 1707 by Alessandro Scarlatti, father of the great keyboard virtuoso and composer Domenico Scarlatti. With the help of one of our choristers, who works at the Stanford music library, I was able to locate an edition long out of print. When I heard how achingly beautiful this wonderful piece is as its lush harmonies slowly unfold, I knew I need search no further.

To round out this survey, I was anxious to present music from the New World. The baroque era saw a great flowering of original music in the Americas, centered mostly in the cathedrals of the major Spanish colonial cities. The cathedral music directors, like their European counterparts, were often expected to write new works for presentation on holidays and feast days. These scores have languished in church vaults and crypts for centuries. Only in the past twenty-five years have scholars rediscovered them, finally shedding light on an important part of music history. Now a wealth of American baroque music can be performed anew for modern audiences.

One champion of this Ibero-American music is Juan Pedro Gaffney R., who founded Coro Hispano de San Francisco specifically to perform the music of Mexican, Central American, and South American composers. Through his Instituto Pro Música de California, Juan Pedro has collected and studied the scores of the lesser-known, but no less talented, composers working in the New World. As a friend and colleague, he has most helpfully suggested scores and coached me on matters of interpretation and pronunciation.

In gratitude for the mentoring this enthusiastic scholar-conductor has given me, I want to encourage you to attend Coro Hispano’s annual program for Día de los Reyes. There will be five performances around the Bay Area, January 5 to 19. Visit their web site at www.corohispano.org/TicketInfo.html for details.

Thanks to Juan Pedro, we present an exquisite Magnificat setting by Francisco López Capillas, based on the third plainchant tone, hence the title Magnificat Tertii Toni. The polyphonic choral sections between verses in traditional plainchant show how deftly, in his direct manner, the composer handles the contrapuntal styles of his European models.

López Capillas was considered to be among the finest composers in New Spain, but his early years are not well documented. Born in Spain, probably in Andalusia in 1615, he had become a priest by 1641 when the cathedral in Puebla, Mexico, hired him as organist and bassoonist. Seven years later, he went to Mexico City, where he eventually enjoyed a 14-year post as maestro de capilla, or choirmaster, at the city’s cathedral.

In a completely different vein, we also sing a villancico by Bolivian composer Juan de Araujo. The villancico as a musical form originated in Spain as a folk idiom, in which coplas, or verses, alternating with a repeated estribillo, or refrain, tell a love story. In the 17th century, this evolved into a sacred form with a polyphonic choral estribillo and solo coplas, but the texts were still in Spanish, not the Latin customary in other church music. Because so many villancicos celebrated Christmas, the term has since come to apply to any Christmas carol.

Araujo was born in 1646 in Spain but moved at a young age to Lima, Peru. After a stint as maestro de capilla in the city of Panamá in the 1660s, he accepted a similar post at the cathedral of Lima. Then in 1680, he began a 32-year tenure, until his death in 1712, as maestro de capilla at the cathedral of La Plata, now called Sucre, in Bolivia.

Almost all of Araujo’s more than 200 known works are villancicos. The composer was especially gifted at following the traditional form while exploring unusual effects, such as cunning word-painting and unexpected syncopations. With his Dime, Amor, a prime example of the villancico, we bring our global Christmas travels to a lively conclusion.

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