Events Diary and Details for
Winter Concert Series 2005 - 2006

St Mary's Church, Boxford

6.00 pm

St Mary's Church, Boxford

Heinrich Biber: Xmas Vespers

6.00 pm

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SUNDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2005, 6. 00 p.m.

St Mary’s Church, Boxford

 A Mozart Celebration

Colin Lawson (basset clarinet), Essex Baroque Orchestra, directed by Peter Holman

2006 is the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birth.  As a prelude to the celebrations we bring together two of his late masterpieces, the Symphony no. 40 in G minor K550 (1788) and the Clarinet Concerto in A major K622 (1791).  They are contrasted with earlier and less familiar works, including the beautiful Concertante for two flutes, two oboes and two bassoons that Mozart extracted from his Posthorn Serenade K320 (1779), the remarkable Adagio and Fugue in C minor K546 (1788), and the light-hearted Divertimento in Eb major K252 (1776) for a sextet of wind instruments.  Colin Lawson is one of the most distinguished exponents of period clarinets in the world, and has performed a number of times at the Festival.  He plays the Mozart concerto on the clarinet for which it was originally conceived: a type of instrument with an extended bass range invented by Anton Stadler, Mozart’s favourite clarinettist and the person for whom the concerto was written.

SUNDAY 11 DECEMBER 2005, 6.00 p.m.

St Mary’s Church, Boxford

Heinrich Biber: Christmas Vespers

Claire Tomlin (soprano), Janet Bullard (alto), Patrick McCarthy (tenor), Eamonn Dougan (bass)

Psalmody

Members of Essex Baroque Orchestra

directed by Peter Holman

The music of Heinrich Biber (1644-1704) has been featured in several SVF concerts in recent years. We performed his monumental Missa Salisburgensis in 2000, and several concerts during the 2004 Festival marked the 300th anniversary of his death. For this year’s Christmas concert we perform a sequence of vesper psalms and a Magnificat richly scored for solo voices, choir and five-part strings. They come from a collection published by Biber in 1693, when he was director of music at the Salzburg court and was writing regularly for Salzburg Cathedral. As would have happened at the time, the psalms are interspersed with motets, hymns, pastorellas and instrumental pieces appropriate to the Christmas season by Biber’s Austrian and south German contemporaries, including Johann Stadlmayr, Giovanni Valentini, Antonio Bertali, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Rupert Ignaz Mayr and Johann Christian Pez.

SUNDAY 12 MARCH, 6.00 p.m.

St Mary’s Church, Boxford

Savadi: Come when I call

Ulrike Hofbauer (soprano), Kristine Jaunalksne (soprano), Marie Bournisien (harp)

Savadi is one of the most exciting ensembles to arrive on the early music scene in recent years. Its three members come from Latvia, Germany and France, and studied together in Basle. They won the 2003 International Early Music Competition at York and the 2004 Van Wassanaer Concours at The Hague, and since then have performed in festivals and concert series throughout Europe. Savadi means ‘in an another way’ in Latvian, and the group is unique in performing the Baroque repertory for one and two sopranos with the beautiful and flexible accompaniment of the Italian triple harp.  In this programme they contrast intense and dramatic solos and duets by Claudio Monteverdi, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Barbara Strozzi and others with music from seventeenth-century England, including songs and dialogues by John Dowland, Robert Johnson, Richard Dering, John Coprario and Henry Purcell. A concert not to be missed.

‘Their fascinating programme was carefully and cleverly chosen, presented with equal measures of humour and scholarship, and brilliantly performed’ – Stephen Varcoe

MONDAY 29 MAY, 6.00 p. m.

St Mary’s Church, Hadleigh

J. S. Bach: Mass in B minor

Philippa Hyde (soprano), Claire Tomlin (soprano), Timothy Travers-Brown (countertenor),

Patrick McCarthy (tenor), Eamonn Dougan (bass)

Psalmody

Essex Baroque Orchestra

directed by Peter Holman

Bach’s Mass in B minor is probably the greatest religious work from the Baroque period.  It has its origins in a separate Sanctus written for a Christmas service at St Thomas’s church in Leipzig in 1724 and a Kyrie and Gloria written for the Dresden court in 1733.  The other movements, the Credo and the Agnus Dei, were added near the end of Bach’s life, in 1747-1749.  The resulting work, like others compiled in Bach’s old age, draws together and sums up a number of traditions, ranging from Renaissance counterpoint to the latest operatic solos, and from Catholic as well as Lutheran church music.  This performance, with a distinguished cast of soloists and a period instrument orchestra, incorporates recent advances in our knowledge of how such works were performed in the eighteenth century.