A Sound from Heaven, As of a Great Wind:
Music by Sheppard, Tallis & Byrd
Saturday, April 25, 4:00 pm
St. Paul’s Memorial Church
1701 University Ave, Charlottesville
In modern life the wind is often a hostile force of nature, blowing destruction through hurricanes, tornadoes, or wildfire. Our spring program focuses on the gentler winds of heaven that were celebrated in the Renaissance for their life-giving blessings. The featured work is John Sheppard’s Western Wind Mass, based on the early sixteenth-century song, The Westron Wynde, a tiny fragment of verse longing for the gentle wisps of air brought by Zephyrus, the Greek god of westerly breezes, who, according to Chaucer, “inspired the tendre croppes.” The program also combines madrigals in praise of Zephyrus with motets honoring the greatest of inspiring winds, the descent of the Holy Spirit on Jesus’s disciples in Jerusalem.
A Spanish Renaissance Christmas:
Music by Victoria, Morales & Guerrero
Saturday, December 6, 7:30 pm
St. John’s Episcopal Church
410 Harrison Street, Scottsville
Friday, December 12, 7:30 pm
St. Paul’s Memorial Church
1701 University Ave, Charlottesville
Saturday, December 13, 4:00 pm
Grace Episcopal Church
5607 Gordonsville Road, Keswick
This year’s Christmas program visits seventeenth-century Spain for a collection of exquisite motets and festive villancicos for Advent and Christmas. The music of Cristóbal de Morales, Francesco Guerrero, and Tomás Luis de Victoria was famous not only in Spain but throughout Europe as well as the Americas. All three also traveled widely themselves, and Guerrero’s nearly five-month trip to the Holy Land in 1588 inspired a popular collection of villancicos for Christmas which was published the following year. The program concludes with the magnificent setting of Verbum caro factum est, for twelve-part choir, by Philippe Rogier, a Flemish composer who spent his career working for the court in Madrid.
Choral Evensong:
Music by Christopher Tye
Sunday, March 8, 6:30 pm
St. Paul’s Memorial Church
1701 University Ave, Charlottesville
The evening prayer service is one of the most beautiful liturgies of the church, and the music written for it is some of the most gorgeous sacred music ever written. At this service Zephyrus sings polyphony for the evening service from the early years of the English Reformation, with music by Christopher Tye, including his beautiful setting of the Nunc dimittis and the exquisite motet In pace.