Early Music Vancouver (EMV) is proud to present Festive Cantatas: Vivaldi’s Gloria and Magnificat on December 23, 2017 at 7:30pm at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts. For this year’s edition of the holiday tradition, EMV will bring together many of the West Coast’s leading female instrumentalists specializing in baroque music on period instruments to share these well known works. The gathering reflects how the repertoire was first conceived and performed in early 18th century Venice. The concert will feature internationally acclaimed and fiery music director, Monica Huggett, who will lead the all-female ensemble from the violin, and refresh these beloved classics by revisiting their roots.
“Much of Vivaldi’s sacred music was written for performance at an orphanage for girls in Venice where all of the performers, except for Vivaldi, were women”, says Matthew White, EMV’s Executive and Artistic Director. “The fact that it is now possible for us to put together a performance of this quality made up almost entirely of exceptionally talented women residing on the West coast, and led by a female conductor of Monica Huggett’s stature, is evidence of how far the period instrument movement has come over the last decade. Hearing these works as they were originally written will help our audiences discover them as if they were experiencing them for the first time.”
For much of his career, Antonio Lucio Vivaldi, was a violin teacher and the musical director of L’Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage for girls in Venice. Many of his best-known choral works, like Gloria and Magnificat, were composed for the female students who lived there. To make this work he arranged all of the four-part vocal music so that women could sing even the lowest parts. By all accounts, Vivaldi’s orchestra at the Pietà was extraordinarily skilled, and like the choir, was also made up entirely of women.
The December 23 program includes three of Vivaldi’s most loved and often-performed choral works that are better known in their standard Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass arrangements. Though Laetatus Sum, Magnificat, and Gloria are all standards of the mixed choir classical repertoire, as Matthew White explains, at the original performances, the “tenor and bass parts were sung by women with low voices, either at notated pitch, or as in our performance, transposed up an octave.” This creates a refreshing rebalancing of harmony that makes these familiar works seem almost like new.
Early Music Vancouver presents Festive Cantatas: Vivaldi’s Gloria and Magnificat
Date: Saturday, December 23, 2017 at 7:30pm
(Pre-Concert Talk at 6:45pm with Matthew White, Christina Hutten, and Monica Huggett in the Royal Bank Cinema)
Address: Chan Shun Concert Hall Chan Centre for the Performing Arts 6265 Crescent Road, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1
Ticket Prices: From $18
Box Office: earlymusic.bc.ca or 604-822-2697
Website: earlymusic.bc.ca
Photo by Tori Ava Photography, Tatiana Daubek, Frances Gaul