On 24 October the British chorus master and acclaimed specialist in the music of the Renaissance and the early Baroque Peter Phillips will be presenting a programme of polyphonic works by Bach, Palestrina, Praetorius and Allegri. Together with Phillips, the Moscow vocal ensemble Intrada (director – Yekaterina Antonenko) and the St Petersburg chorus Festino (director – Alexandra Makarova) will be setting out on a journey entitled From the Renaissance to the Baroque. Intrada is well-known not just to those in Moscow; the ensemble collaborates with Vladimir Jurowski and Christopher Moulds and appears at the December Evenings festival in Moscow and the Early Music festival in St Petersburg. One of the more recent programmes which audiences still remember featured all of Bach’s motets, performed in summer at the Rachmaninoff Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire under the baton of Stuttgart-based conductor Frieder Bernius.
The Festino chorus started out along the path of historical performance relatively recently, and in St Petersburg it is known from Andrei Moguchy’s production of What Is to Be Done? at the Bolshoi Drama Theatre and a collaborative project with composer Nastasia Khrushcheva. At one prestigious choral competition in Marktoberdorf in Germany this spring the director of Festino, Alexandra Makarova, won the prize as “Best Young Conductor”.
Peter Phillips is the founder and director of the legendary vocal ensemble Tallis Scholars, which performs religious music a cappella. In 2009 the magazine Early Music Today named Phillips’ ensemble one of the most influential in the history of the genre, ranking the conductor alongside such musicians as David Munrow, Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Christopher Hogwood.
The concert programme includes motets by Palestrina and Bach and the famous Miserere by Allegri, which at one point was “kidnapped” by the fourteen-year-old Mozart from the Sistine Chapel. It will be provided with a beautiful framework in the form of three works to one and the same Latin text Spem in alium (“Hope in Any Other Have I None”); Palestrina’s mass and the four-voice motet by Jacquet of Mantua that forms its basis will open the concert while the evening will conclude with Thomas Tallis’ grandiose forty-voice motet.
| user_name | | Exit |
