Sunday 22 March 2020 800 PM
The Choir of the Cathedral of the Madeleine featuring the Choristers of the Madeleine Choir School will present the following music:
Arvo Pärt
Stabat Mater. Op. 58
Johann Sebastian Bach
Cantata BWV 147, "Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben"
Stabat Mater is a thirteenth-century text attributed to Jacopone da Todi. Its title is an abbreviation of the first line, Stabat mater dolorosa:The sorrowful mother was standing beneath the Cross. The hymn, one of the most powerful and moving of the medieval sequences, meditates on the suffering of Mary, the mother of Christ, during his crucifixion and death. Arvo Pärt is an Estonian composer whose early works were often criticized and censored by Soviet authorities. In 1976 he emerged from an eight-year period of self-imposed musical exile with a first composition in a new musical style that was to be dubbed tintinnabuli,highlighting the bell-like quality of his music. Pärt’s music is known to express pain, sadness, and soul-stirring beauty, making his setting of this text the apt rendering of a parent’s distress at the loss of a child. Johann Sebastian Bach’s very joyful Cantata No. 147 invites listeners to offer “heart and mouth and deed and living as witness to Christ.” The Cantata, slated for use on the Feast of the Visitation, was composed in 1723, the first year of Bach’s long tenure as the Thomaskantorin Leipzig.