CRICKHOWELL CHORAL SOCIETY & ORCHESTRA

GLORIA! A CELEBRATORY 40TH ANNIVERSARY CONCERT

TICKET REGISTRATION SUSPENDED (Please see below)

St Edmund’s Church, Crickhowell

Saturday 27^th November 2021 7.30pm.

Exuberant paeans of praise from the great masters!

The choir is looking forward to bursting into song after their Covid-induced silence and intends to celebrate in style.

Its programme contains some suitably grand and ceremonial sounds that befit this important milestone in the choir’s history.

The coronation music from Handel and Mozart should add that all-important air of dignity to the occasion, whilst the joyous music of Vivaldi will lift the spirits. Soloists will be drawn from the choir and Choral Scholars.

The Gloria has become one of Vivaldi’s most loved works. It is one of three settings he made for the pupils of Venice’s Pietà around 1715 and is full of many appealing ideas so typical of the composer’s style. Astonishingly it waited until 1939 for a revival!

The King shall rejoice is one of 4 anthems that George II commissioned for his coronation in 1727. Handel, who had then just become a naturalised British subject, certainly rose to the occasion, creating a ceremonial style that captures the grandeur and excitement of the event and also utilizes the wonderful acoustics and choral forces of Westminster Abbey.

A similar sense of pomp and circumstance can evidently be felt in Mozart’s Mass in C K317 since in 1792 it was sung at the coronation of Francis II as Holy Roman Emperor and has remained the preferred mass setting for royal coronations at the imperial Viennese court ever since. Its first performance however was in 1779 on Easter Sunday in Salzburg where Mozart had regained employment after a spell of fruitless job-searching in Paris and Mannheim.

Programme

The programme includes:

VIVALDI: GLORIA RV 589
MOZART: CORONATION MASS K317
HANDEL: THE KING SHALL REJOICE (Coronation Anthem)