Bruckner:
Mass in E minor & Motets
Saturday 27 June 2020 at 7:30pm
 
COVID-19 Coronavirus
This concert was unfortunately cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
  Date:  Saturday 27 June 2020
  Time: 7:30pm
  Venue:  St Matthew’s Church, Kettering Road, Northampton, NN1 4RY
 
Due to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, this concert has been cancelled.
 
Previous Concert
 
   
The Choral Masterpieces of Bruckner

One of Bruckner’s most remarkable works, the Mass in E minor (1866-82) was composed for the dedication of the votive chapel in the (then) new Linz Cathedral. It is composed for the unusual combination of eight-part chorus and fifteen wind instruments; indeed the choice of wind instruments is itself unusual - oboes, clarinets and bassoons (but not flutes), with horns, trumpets, and trombones. It is based strongly on old-church music tradition, and particularly old Gregorian style singing. The Kyrie is almost entirely made up of a cappella singing for eight voices, the Gloria ends with a fugue, as in Bruckner's other masses, and in the Sanctus, Bruckner uses a theme from Palestrina’s Missa Brevis In the climactic moments all voice parts reach the very highest reaches, in remarkable sequences of suspensions and resolutions.

Alongside the Mass the choir sing a chronological selection of Bruckner’s unaccompanied motets, beginning with the 11 year-old Bruckner’s first Pange lingua setting, and ending with the 68 year-old’s Vexilla regis, introduced as part of an illustration of Bruckner’s life by our Musical Director (who dedicates the concert to his late friend, and Bruckner scholar, Paul Coones (1955-2018)).

Programme:

Northampton Bach Choir

Conductor & Compere -
Lee Dunleavy

Seven Motets from Seven Decades
for unaccompanied chorus

Pange lingua (1835)
Christus factus est (1844)
Ave Maria (1861)
Locus iste (1869)
Os justi meditabitur (1879)
Christus factus est (1884)
Vexilla Regis (1892)

- Interval of twenty minutes -

Mass No. 2 in E minor (1866, rev. 1882)
for eight-part chorus and fifteen wind instruments