Romance & Revival

Liszt, Bruckner & Monteverdi

Friday 9 May 2008 at 7.30 pm

St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, London, EC2V 6AU [Transport links / Map]

£10 (full price), £8 (concessions)

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Romanticism meets the Renaissance in an exciting concert of sacred choral music by Franz Liszt, Anton Bruckner and Claudio Monteverdi. Romance and Revival combines the drama of Romanticism with the stylistic purity of the Italian Renaissance. It also demonstrates the theatricality of Monteverdi in two superb examples of his dramatic style which open the concert: his exuberant Beatus Vir of c.1630 (a setting of Psalm 112 for six voices and organ) followed by the complex unaccompanied six-part motet Domine de in furore tuo of 1620.

Bruckner's three unaccompanied four-part Graduals Locus iste, Os Justi and Christus factus est, composed between 1869 and 1884, are the composer's personal response to the mid-19th-century drive to purify the music composed for church use. They are simple and direct but full of rich tone-colour and contrast. In Christus factus est the music rises to a dramatic climax, followed by an equally dramatic whispered conclusion.

The second half of the concert is devoted to Liszt's unashamedly dramatic four-part mass of 1865, the Missa Choralis. This was written during the period that Liszt was resident in Rome taking holy orders and was fired up with a mission to restore mystical depths to church music. The mass shows a debt to Liszt's deep study of Palestrina in its simplicity of expression and texture (the singing is essentially a capella with organ support), but is imbued with a 19th-century tonality, with chord modulations which are often dramatically unexpected. The programme shows Liszt's and Bruckner's romantic interest in reviving the music of the distant past, in order to rediscover a simplicity of expression found in the music of Monteverdi and his contemporaries.

Conductor: Madeleine Lovell