For tickets and other details please see our events page
Mendelssohn
Mozart
Handel - Messiah
16 December 2008
Spring Concert
Aberdeen Music Hall - 16th March 2010 7.30pm
For details of soloists and tickets please see our events page
As part of the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the opening of Aberdeen’s famous Music Hall, whose wonderful acoustics have been admired by many visiting artists including Sir John Barbirolli, the Aberdeen Choral Society is joining the University of Aberdeen Choral Society in music by Mendelssohn and Mozart.
The Ruy Blas Overture by Mendelssohn opens the concert. This exciting work, by turns solemn and sparkling, has on the face of it little to do with Victor Hugo’s melodrama. Indeed after reading it in translation, Mendelssohn took a dim view of the French writer’s work describing it as ‘odious’ and ‘beneath contempt’. The music however is one of the composer’s freshest and most inventive creations.
The combined choirs join for the eight-part setting of Psalm 43 written in 1843 for the choir of Berlin Cathedral – a monumental setting in three sonorous sections with an unusually serene concluding Gloria Patri. The first half of the concert ends with the rarely performed but by no means insignificant cantata Lauda Sion for four-part soloists, chorus and orchestra. This attractive and melodious work was commissioned to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the institution of the feast of Corpus Christi.
Mozart’s intensely dramatic and original setting of the Requiem Mass completes the programme. This is one of the great composer’s most original works but remains a puzzle for musicologists. Mozart’s declining health made it impossible for him to finish it. Two of his pupils, Joseph Eybler and Franz Xaver Süssmayr completed the work. How much of the music is theirs and how much was dictated by the dying composer? We shall never know but in general, despite occasional slight weaknesses the music abounds in music of the greatest beauty and profundity.
December 2010
Messiah
George Frederick Handel (1685 - 1759)
Aberdeen Music Hall - December 2009 7.15pm
For details of soloists and tickets please see our events page
" And without controversy, great is the Mystery of Godliness; God as manifested in the Flesh, justify'd by the Spirit, seen of Angels, preached among the Gentiles, believed on in the World, received up in Glory.
"In whom are hid all the Treasures of wisdom and knowledge."
Thus read the cover of the word book for the first London performance of "Messiah" at the Covent Garden Theatre (now the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden) on 23 March 1743.
It was two years earlier that Handel responded to the Lord Lieutenant's invitation to visit Dublin with a "sacred oratorio" for the benefit of some of the city's charities. The text was compiled from Biblical sources by Charles Jennens and was composed in London in the astonishingly short period between 22nd August and 14th September 1741. Even allowing for Handel's frequent recourse to previously composed material (choruses such as "And he shall purify" and "For unto us" derive from music written for secular Italian cantatas) - "Messiah" remains an extraordinary sustained burst of inspiration.
Although an oratorio "Messiah" (and to some extent the choral epic "Israel and Egypt") stands apart from Handel's other works of this type. It has no plot in the operatic sense of the word and they are the only pieces whose text is taken exclusively from the Bible. Nevertheless Handel was essentially a musical dramatist and "Messiah" is, as Window Dean has written, a "unique fusion" of the traditions of Italian opera, English anthem and German passion".
As such the work occupies a unique position in British musical life. This has not always been to its advantage; the drama, the wit and the humanity of the music - even in his own lifetime - were obscured by what was seen as its immense dignity and sublimity. Mammoth performances by hundreds of voices and enormous orchestras have occasionally got in the way of the composer's intentions. The extraordinary directness of vision and blazing sincerity of "Messiah" together with its unquenchable vigour and vitality, will, it is to be hoped always shine through.
