2015-2016 Season
In its 45th season, CRSP used the whimsical potential of the ampersand [&] to marry some unlikely but highly compatible partners.
PAST CONCERTS
CRSP Presents • Byrd & Birds
December 5, 2015 @ 7:30 pm
St. Stephen’s Anglican Church – 1121 14 Avenue SW, Calgary
In this concert, CRSP presented the choral music of the English Renaissance composer William Byrd as well as early and modern music about birds, including the ever popular – “Musicological Journey Through The Twelve Days Of Christmas.”
Composer William Byrd led the life of a rock star on the run. He ran a publishing monopoly with his good friend Thomas Tallis; he made and lost fortunes; and he got out of trouble with England’s ecumenical authorities by gaining the favour of the reigning monarch, Elizabeth I. Through it all, he wrote some of the most beautiful choral music ever to come out of England.
Byrd’s setting of the text Hodie Christus natus est finds a partner in a setting from Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols. Byrd’s Ave Maria meets John Rutter’s Christmas Lullaby and its “Ave Maria” chorus. And Byrd’s triumphant This Day Christ is Born dances with the traditional English carol I Saw Three Ships, in a setting by another late, great English composer: Sir David Willcocks.
The second half of our program was filled with bird calls, notably in an ingenious work called Le chant des oyseaux by Clément Janequin. Janequin’s masterwork found foils in the Beatles’ Blackbird and also in Craig Courtney’s clever setting of a well-known bird-themed carol, which in his hands becomes A Musicological Journey Through The Twelve Days Of Christmas.
We were delighted to have our guest artist, the incomparable organist Chellan Hoffman, music director at Knox United Church and one of Calgary’s busiest performers.
CRSP Presents • Play & Pray
April 17, 2016 @ 3:00 pm
St. Stephen’s Anglican Church (1121 – 14th Avenue SW, Calgary)
Guest Musicians: Joan Kent, viola de gamba & John van Leeuwen, recorder
In this concert, we took a journey to the Italian Renaissance – the time and place that birthed some of the world’s most sublime sacred music, and that also witnessed the blossoming of Carnevale, the annual joy-filled and excess-laden carnival which cartwheeled through the beginning of each calendar year in Renaissance Italy.
The first half of program featured reflective sacred music of the Italian Renaissance,
including Palestrina’s setting of the Stabat Mater text, as well as 21st-century composer Ola Gjeilo’s Agnus Dei: Phoenix.
In contrast, in the second half, we presented Carnevale which was seen as an opportunity to enjoy revelry to the fullest before the austerity of the Lenten season, and to take the merry-making to the streets, where rich and poor alike could take part. Carnevale included feasting, dancing, street theatre, wandering bands of minstrels, jugglers, and a degree of bawdy behaviour — in other words, a rip-roaring costume party, Renaissance-style. CRSP performed rowdy madrigals about drinking and seduction, with a little silliness thrown in for good measure.
Our musical guests, John van Leeuwen and Joan Kent, regaled the audience with some recorder-and-gamba music of the period.