Cappella Pratensis

Name: Cappella Pratensis
Start: 2025-05-02T22:00:00+01:00
Location: St. Fin Barre's Cathedral

Schedule

Fri, 02 May, 2025 at 10:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

St. Fin Barre's Cathedral | Cork, CK

Cappella Pratensis [The Netherlands] | Tim Braithwaite
For almost forty years, Cappella Pratensis has been renowned for its innovative approach to the performance of Renaissance polyphonic music, being one of only a handful of professional ensembles in the world who perform directly from historical notation, as opposed to transcriptions in the form of a modern choral score. In recent years, the ensemble has dived further into the musical traditions surrounding this repertoire by exploring historical methods of improvisation and pedagogies, as well as working within the contexts of liturgical reconstruction. The result is an inherently immersive approach, in which the performers draw on a truly embodied relationship with past musical cultures in order to provide convincing and engaging performances.
In addition to regular appearances at concert venues in the Netherlands and Belgium, Cappella Pratensis has performed at leading international festivals and concert series throughout Europe, North America, South America, and Japan, including the Boston, Berkeley, Utrecht, and York Early Music Festivals. The ensemble’s recordings have met with critical acclaim and distinctions from the press, including the Diapason d’Or, the Prix Choc and, for the last three CDs, three consecutive Gramophone Editor’s Choice mentions. Gramophone magazine recognised the ensemble’s recording of the Ockeghem Requiem as the best out of more than twenty recordings made over the last forty years. In 2022, Cappella Pratensis won the prestigious REMA-EEMN Heritage Project of the Year Award with the CD recording Apostola apostolorum. The ensemble’s 2023 recording of Obrecht’s Missa Maria zart won the Premio Abbiati della critica musicale, was awarded with a Disco Excepcional by the Spanish music magazine Scherzo, and was rated five stars by the Spanish magazine Ritmo.
Josquin in Rome
Missa Ave maris stella
If the name of Josquin Desprez today ranks among such consummate Renaissance artists as Raphael and Michelangelo, this was no less the case in his own day. Josquin was truly “a legend in his own time”, the most famous of the Franco- Flemish composers who sought fame and fortune in Italy. This fame opened the door to appointments in top ensembles in Milan and Ferrara, but surely his most towering achievement was as singer and composer at the Sistine Chapel in Rome. In this program, Cappella Pratensis returns to its core repertoire with music composed by Josquin for the celebration of the Annunciation in the Sistine Chapel. In this evocation of the Roman liturgy, pride of place is taken by his exquisite Missa Ave maris stella. The movements of the mass are complemented by the plainchant propers, sung from a facsimile of a Roman gradual from which Josquin himself would have sung. The program is rounded out by Marian motets, including a setting of the hymn on which the mass is based, Ave maris stella, in which Josquin added new verses to an existing setting by his illustrious predecessor, Guillaume Dufay.