'Music making
as it should be - as fine a performance as could be wished for' (Somerset County Gazette), 'One
of the finest examples of mixed professional amateur performers in the country' (Taunton Times)These are just two examples of the press reviews which reflected our performance in Wells Cathedral last summer.
This year, BACH2000, the worldwide festival marking the composer's 300th anniversary, is celebrated in Wells Cathedral in a summer concert of some of the most glorious ceremonial music by Bach and his illustrious contemporaries, Vivaldi and Handel.
In this programme of brilliant works from Bach's Leipzig , Vivaldi's Venice and Handel's London of the 1720s, the choir is joined by Canzona, the highly-regarded period instrument orchestra, the virtuoso organist, Richard Pearce, and five of the UK's most outstanding young singers. We are particularly delighted to welcome soprano Joanne Lunn, a soloist in the first UK concert of Sir John Eliot Gardiner's year-long, world-wide Bach Cantata Pilgimage with the Monteverdi Choir.
Zadok the priest
and My heart is inditing, two of Handel's anthems composed for the Coronation of George II and Queen Caroline held in Westminster Abbey in 1727, provide a spectacular opening to the concert. Vivaldi's flamboyantly extrovert setting of Dixit Dominus employs two orchestras, two choirs and five soloists in one of his largest-scale sacred compositions - a truly breathtaking work including some of his most thrilling orchestral, choral and solo writing.
The second half of the concert is devoted entirely to the music of Bach. The famous Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor leads into Immortal Bach, a brief but extraordinary 20th-century tribute by the contemporary Norwegian composer, Knut Nystedt in which music by Bach is used as the starting point for a moving meditation sung by five choirs dispersed throughout the Cathedral.
Bach's
glorious Magnificat, composed in 1723 for his first Christmas Day as Kantor at the Tomaskirche in Leipzig and subsequently revised around 1730, forms the climax of the concert. Scored for five-part choir, five vocal soloists and the largest orchestra available to Bach, this hugely varied setting is full of vivid contrasts. Powerful, dramatic choruses contrasted with more intimate movements for vocal and instrumental soloists provide a wide range of different styles and colours - a true Baroque masterpiece.
Join us for this feast of Baroque music performed by excellent singers and instrumentalists in an incomparable setting - the perfect concert for the first summer of the 21st century!
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© Somerset Chamber Choir 2000