Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/12/2023
7:00 pm
Location
The United Reformed Church
Category(ies)
Stowmarket Chorale – Concert
Mozart – Missa in C – Sparrow Mass
Buxtehude – Magnificat McDowall – Christus Natus Est
Audience Carols
William Baldry – Conductor Richard Cook – Organ
Saturday December 2nd – 7.00pm.
United Reformed Church, Ipswich Street, Stowmarket. IP14 1AD
Tickets: £18 (under 18’s free)
Booking. Tel: 07972 668180 email: tickets@stowmarketchorale.org.uk
Pay on the door
Earlybird offer: Tickets £15 if booked between 2 -16 November
Stowmarket Chorale hope that you will join us for our Christmas Concert.
We will be singing Mozart’s Mass in C major, K220 “Sparrow”, Buxtehude’s Magnificat and McDowall’s Christus Natus Est followed by Audience Carols.
Mozart’s “Missa in C major” (K.220) was nicknamed the “Sparrow Mass” for the violin figures in the Hosanna which resemble bird chirping. Composed in 1775 or 1776 is one of the most significant pieces of church music from Mozart’s years in Salzburg. It was scored with brass and timpani in addition to four soloists, a four-part choir, strings and organ. There are six movements: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei. It was possibly first performed on 7 April 1776 in a mass for Easter at the Salzburg Cathedral.
The Magnificat survives only in a single, manuscript source: a set of parts and a score from the collection of Gustav Düben, who was Kapellmeister at the German church in Stockholm from 1663 till his death in 1690. It has lilting triple-time melodies and simple harmonies and a clear sectional structure. The attribution to Dietrich Buxtehude was made by musicologist Bruno Grusnick, probably due to similarities with other pieces by Buxtehude in Düben’s Collection. Whilst Buxtehude’s authorship has been questioned, he became the most highly paid musician (organist) in Lübeck and the Magnificat has long been a favourite in Germany.
Cecilia McDowall is one of the UK’s leading composers of sacred and secular choral music. She studied piano and composition, graduating in 1975. Cecilia has won many awards including, in 2014, the British Composer Award in the Choral category for Night Flight. Cecilia is signed by Oxford University Press as an ‘Oxford’ composer and she is ‘composer-in-residence’ at Dulwich College, London.
This Christmas cantata composed in 2007, presents a sequence of the five carols ‘Personent hodie’, ‘Entre le boeuf’, ‘Gaudete!’, ‘Infant holy’, and ‘Angelus ad Virginem’ and McDowall gives the familiar melodies a colourful new harmonic treatment.