As a participant and contributor, following our online live-streamed concert under Douglas Tang on 17th, here is an opportunity to listen again on demand until 30th November 2020.

The weblink may be purchased by making an online donation – through which you will be generously closing the gap between the ticketed event income and the real costs of the broadcast.

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http://www.ticketsource.co.uk/archicantiores

and/or contact
Enquiry email : archicantiores@hotmail.com
Enquiry phone : 07860 706 963 [ Jonathan Louth | ARCHICantuor ]

In an authentic realization of Rossini’s premiere, his chamber score, yet adapted to a post-Coronavirus pandemic world, our twelve singers were grouped not as 4 soli + 8 chorus but as three equal ensembles of all four voice parts. Our live programme acknowledged the Bloomsbury Festival 2020 theme of vision by including a complementary set of romantic sacred and secular choral works surrounding the same period – Berlioz, Bruckner, Sullivan, Elgar – about visions and glories and dreams and fantasias all introduced by church architect and baritone, Jonathan Louth

Stretching through collective memory, beyond the era of history, to the eons of archaeology, our sentient ancestors deified, celebrated & depicted those creative forces, which each generation senses behind & beneath their rational thoughts. Through all discoverable realms of time, our forebears have formalized this sense of “an unknown beyond” into ritua, celebrations of socio-political rites of passage. Pre-eminently, the Judeo-Christian faith – formed in a paradise garden, reaffirmed in an Abrahamic ram of sacrifice – has developed a formal remembrance of death and resurrection in the Propers of the Mass. We are inheritors of this richest treasure, supporting its rites with visions of glory through the strains of words and music.
Rossini seizes the licence of old age to celebrate the joys and the theatre of the Mass in an operatic yet not sacrilegious setting. Surviving so long as he did, the composers whose works he touched and whose style he liberated, ultimately touched him: thus the Petite Messe solennelle fuses traditional early C19th classical harmonic structures with late C19th romantic freedoms while presaging the enharmonic modulations that will give rise to English pastoralism and Germanic atonality.

Sullivan’s The long day closes foretells the calm of death.

Elgar’s As torrents in Summer envisions God at the fountains of life, just as Moses had found him in the burning bush.
They are at rest also by Elgar promises us an aboriginal Eden as reward for life’s labours.
Bruckner’s Pange lingua gloriously praises the fruits of death, which alone redeem our shortcomings in this mortal life.
Then Laus! Laus! Hosanna from Berlioz The Damnation of Faust manifests our dream of some reward yet to come.