2013-2014 Season
PAST CONCERTS
CRSP Presents • The English Invasion of the Sixties… the 1560s!
December 7, 2013 @ 7:30 pm
St. Stephen’s Anglican Church – 1121 14 Avenue SW, Calgary
Consider this: in the 1960s, four talented fellows from Liverpool, England shot to national and then international rock’n’roll stardom under the unlikely group name The Beatles. Despite a lack of formal musical education, the songwriting duo of John Lennon and Paul McCartney understood how to touch people’s hearts and inspire their imaginations.
Four hundred years earlier, in the 1560s, England’s “rock stars” were formally educated church musicians. Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, and Orlando Gibbons were household names. Like Lennon and McCartney, these men understood how to touch people’s hearts with their music. As with many present-day rock stars, our 1560s music heroes had their ups and downs. Tallis and Byrd made and lost a fortune together in music publishing. Byrd in particular ran into trouble with the law of the church, in that he had Catholic sympathies at a time when Catholicism was banned in England. Meanwhile, Orlando Gibbons shocked his friends and admirers by dying young, in another foreshadowing of some rock-star lives today.
This concert focused on music by Tallis, Byrd and Gibbons, with a nod to more recent English music heroes Gustav Holst, John Rutter, and, yes, The Beatles. Our arrangement of “Blackbird” was created by a member of another 1960s upstart English group: The King’s Singers. We performed an English country dance in the lobby during the intermission, with accompaniment on crumhorn and recorder played by two of our own players. With guest pipe organist Timothy Pyper contributing his musical genius to our concert playing on the beautiful baroque organ, this was an unforgettable event.
This concert was in part a fundraising event for Calgary’s National Music Centre, which lost part of its historical keyboard collection in the June 2013 flood.
CRSP Presents • Rock Stars of the Italian Renaissance
April 12, 2014 @ 7:30 pm
St. Stephen’s Anglican Church (1121 – 14th Avenue SW, Calgary)
Guest Musicians: Scott Blair & Alan Jessop
Roll over, Beethoven! Italy was full of “rock stars” in the Renaissance, starring in the flirtatious madrigal as well as the sacred polyphonic mass. The concert included madrigals by Di Lasso, Gesualdo and Gastoldi on themes that every rock star loves: wine, women, and song. To complement the male perspective on love, a female Italian poet of the Renaissance, Isabella Andreini, sings of her desire in a new motet composed by our own Marcia Jenneth Epstein. Monteverdi was also a star of the motet, but one or two arias from “The Coronation of Poppea” reveal why Italians fell in love with the opera. Our audience was transported to the heavenly realms via the rock star of the church music scene in sixteenth-century Rome, Palestrina, whose Tu Es Petrus mass and motet fit perfectly with our theme.
Between vocal pieces, our guest musicians enchanted us with the music of Frescobaldi and other Italian masters, accompanied by Jane Perry on harpsichord.