The Cathedral Family Series Concert

Friday 25 October 2019 at 1000 AM 

Händel! – An exploration of the Baroque era composer Georg Friedrich Händel for young children with a special visitor from the past!

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The St. Cecilia's Day Concert 

Henry Purcell

Funeral Music of Queen Mary Z 860

Georg Friedrich Händel       

Te Deum for the Victory at the Battle of Dettingen HWV 283

Zadok the Priest, HWV 258

Two British Monarchs are the origin for three works performed at this year’s St. Cecilia’s Day Concert. The foreign and not-so British monarch George II, with music by the equally foreign Georg Friedrich Händel, and Queen Mary II, wife of William of Orange, whose death in 1694 inspired the Westminster Abbey Master of Choristers Henry Purcell to set texts for her Interment. In 1743, George II led the British army in a battle at Dettingen, the last British Monarch to actually lead troops in combat. His victory over the French – well, actually just a clever escape – was cause for celebration and an opportunity to increase the affection of the citizenry for their German King. On Sunday November 27, 1743, the very festive Te Deum was performed for the first time in a morning service of worship at London’s St. James Palace Chapel, while Purcell’s sensitive musical setting of the texts of mourning were heard for the first time at the Funeral of Queen Mary on March 5, 1695.

Performed in the Cathedral of the Madeleine.

Passes are required.

Sunday 17 November 2019 800 PM

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The Founders' Day Concert 

Stabat Mater is a thirteenth-century text attributed to Jacopone da Todi. Its title is an abbreviation of the first line, Stabat mater dolorosa:The sorrowful mother was standing beneath the Cross. The hymn, one of the most powerful and moving of the medieval sequences, meditates on the suffering of Mary, the mother of Christ, during his crucifixion and death. Arvo Pärt is an Estonian composer whose early works were often criticized and censored by Soviet authorities. In 1976 he emerged from an eight-year period of self-imposed musical exile with a first composition in a new musical style that was to be dubbed tintinnabuli,highlighting the bell-like quality of his music. Pärt’s music is known to express pain, sadness, and soul-stirring beauty, making his setting of this text the apt rendering of a parent’s distress at the loss of a child. Johann Sebastian Bach’s very joyful Cantata No. 147 invites listeners to offer “heart and mouth and deed and living as witness to Christ.”  The Cantata, slated for use on the Feast of the Visitation, was composed in 1723, the first year of Bach’s long tenure as the Thomaskantorin Leipzig.

Sunday 22 March 2020 800 PM

A link for the general public to request passes will be made available on this page Thursday, March 5, 2020.

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Good Friday Choral Meditation

Performed in the Cathedral of the Madeleine.

G. B. Da Pergolesi  

Stabat mater

Every year on Good Friday the Choristers of the Cathedral Choir offer a performance of the Stabat Materby Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, as a choral meditation upon the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. The inspired and trenchant composition, set for two treble voices and strings, consists of twelve short works, half of which are sung by the entire choir while the remaining are performed as solos and duets. The Stabat Materwas composed by Pergolesi at the end of his short life at a Franciscan monastery in Pozzuoli and it was written as a replacement for the Scarlatti setting in use at the church of Maria dei Sette Dolori in Naples.

Friday 10 April 2020 300 PM

Madeleine Festival Concert 

Ralph Vaughan Williams     

The Lark Ascending   

A Vision of Aeroplanes  

Dona Nobis Pacem

Ralph Vaughan Williams possessed a great appreciation for poetry and lyrical texts, and set many of the great English poets throughout history including George Herbert, Alfred Tenneyson and William Shakespeare. Having been deeply distressed through his service in World War I, Vaughan Williams composed his Dona Nobis Pacem(Grant us peace) in 1936 as the winds of war were again brewing in Europe. He chose texts from the Roman Catholic Mass, biblical texts and, remarkably, the poetry of the nineteenth century US poet Walt Whitman. Whitman lived in Washington, DC during the horrors of the Civil War, and often volunteered in makeshift hospitals caring for the wounded and dying soldiers. In Whitman’s poetry, Vaughan Williams found the stirring voice for peace he desired in this cantata pleading for an end to war and its catastrophic impact on the lives of all. A Vision of Aeroplanes,a 1956 setting of the biblical text of the Prophet Ezekiel has been described as featuring “cataclysmic organ writing and whirling voice-part.”

Performed in the Cathedral of the Madeleine.

No passes required.

Sunday 17 May 2020 800 PM

The Madeleine Festival is an annual partner in our concert season. Donors of the Madeleine Festival of Arts should contact Trish Wesson pwesson@utcotm.org to request reserved seating for this concert on May 17, 2020. Donors of the Choir School at $500 and above since January 1, 2019 will be contacted by the Office of Advancement regarding Reserved Seating opportunities. Other seating for this performance is General Admission and no passes are required.

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Thank you very kindly for supporting The Madeleine Choir School and the local arts.