Renaissance and Resurgence Featuring "The Lamentations of Jeremiah" by Thomas Tallis

Name: Renaissance and Resurgence Featuring "The Lamentations of Jeremiah" by Thomas Tallis
Start: 2024-10-20T15:00:00-05:00
Location: All Saints' Cathedral

Schedule

Sun Oct 20 2024 at 03:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

All Saints' Cathedral | Milwaukee, WI

"Renaissance and Resurgence" will be presented Oct. 20, 3 pm, at stunning All Saints' Cathedral in downtown Milwaukee. All Saints' is the perfect venue for this performance... it is one of our city's historic and architectural gems (built in 1868).
This concert - which kicks off our 55th Anniversary Season - is going to be a reflective, deeply impactful and hopeful musical journey!
The first half focuses on RENAISSANCE - beginning with William Byrd's "Ave Verum Corpus" (Hail, O Hail, True Body) in Latin. It will give you goosebumps. Next comes Thomas Tallis' exquisite "If Ye Love Me" - a setting of a passage from the Gospel of John.
Then it's the concert's cornerstone: "The Lamentations of Jeremiah" - Tallis' Holy Week masterpiece... among the best known music works of the Tudor period. It has been called deeply impactful and unforgettable. The texts lament the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Babylonians. It is somber... the voices of the five parts engage in an imitative polyphonic conversation which is filled with quiet weeping, anguish, and moments of shimmering, transcendent light.
Which segues to RESURGENCE in our program's second half - American pieces that embody resurgence, taking our own musical traditions and producing compositions that give new life to old standards.
Starting with "Stars I Shall Find" - music by Seth Houston, poem by Sara Teasdale. Teasdale, a Pulitzer prize-winning poet, suffered from poor physical and mental health most of her life. Her poem, while written from a place of sadness, expresses profound hope for the future... a "world of my devising."
"Bright Morning Stars" arr. by Shawn Kirchner is a traditional Appalachian song that links the beautiful, universal and "external" imagery of dawn and morning stars to the similar "internal" movements of renewal that we all experience - "day a-breaking in my soul."
We LOVE composer Dan Forrest, and next comes two of his pieces. "God of the Deep" offers sweeping, hopeful harmonies and lyrics. "I hope in Him whose skill and wisdom far exceed my own, the secrets of the hidden depths belong to God alone."
"Alway Something Sings," with lyrics (poem) by Ralph Waldo Emerson, is a haunting, touching, hopeful piece. In part:
'Tis not in the high stars alone,
Nor in the cup of budding flowers.
Nor in the robin's mellow tone,
Nor in the bow that smiles in showers,
But in the darkest, meanest things
There alway, alway something sings.
Then we move to "O Love" by Elaine Hagenberg. It is ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS and will bring tears to your eyes. The title says it all.
The performance concludes with the rousing, popular, a cappella, "Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal" arranged by Alice Parker (originally written for the Robert Shaw Chorale). "Hallelujah, praise the Lamb, Hallelujah, Glory to the great I AM!"
We will also be treated to a very happy and inspirational organ piece by our talented accompanist, Johanna Brahm!
After taking this journey together, you will leave All Saints' feeling introspective and renewed. We hope you will join us! Visit www.bachchoirmilwaukee.com for tickets.