Saturday October 27 at 8:00 pm
St. Basil’s Church, 50 St. Joseph Street
$14 adults, $8 seniors/students
A Celebration of Love, Death and Hope…
A truly celebratory conclusion to the Bach Festival Lecture-Concert Series, in which The University of Toronto MacMillan Singers partner with international soloists and orchestra to celebrate themes of love, death and hope through the music of J.S. Bach, Gustav Holst, and Pēteris Vasks.
Bach: Cantata BWV56 Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen
- Soloist Jason Nedecky, baritone; Understudy: Alistair Smith
- MacMillan Singers; Bach Festival Chamber Orchestra
- Helmuth Rilling, conductor
This Cantata (“I will gladly carry the cross-staff”) was originally composed for performance on Oct. 27, 1726. The cantata sets the scene of life as a sea voyage, taking its musical and thematic cues from both the nautical navigational uses of a Kreuzstab (forerunner to a sextant) and from the pun inherent in that noun: ‘Kreuz’ meaning both ‘sharp’ and ‘cross’.
Holst: Savitri
- Soloists Laura Albino, sop.; Nicholas Isherwood, bass;
Darryl Edwards, tenor. Understudies: Aviva Wilks, David Roth, Rocco Rupolo.
- MacMillan Singers; Bach Festival Chamber Orchestra
- Doreen Rao, conductor
Savitri, Holst’s one-act opera, tells the story of a woman who sets out to wrest her beloved husband Satyavan from the grasp of Death, by asserting the power of human love over despair. This Festival performance of the opera includes traditional Kathak dance which visually illustrates and augments Holst’s setting of this story from the famous Indian epic, the Mahabharata.
Vasks: Dona Nobis Pacem
- MacMillan Singers; Bach Festival Chamber Orchestra
- Doreen Rao, conductor
Composed in 1996 for mixed chorus and strings, Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks’ Dona Nobis Pacem has been hailed with joy for the past decade. Vasks’ works consistently explore both human delight in natural life and the danger of the decay of both that love and that life through use of traditional Latvian musical elements. In this piece, Vasks “creates a gorgeous plea for peace, by turns meditative, imploring, tranquil and profoundly sad. The gentle dissonances glow, the vocal lines soar, the violin harmonics at the end shimmer likes swarms of fireflies.”
