This concert is a choral journey through the whole season of Lent. Listeners will be relieved to hear that a Lenten pilgrimage in music does not mean a month and a half’s worth of uninterrupted sackcloth and ashes. Each week of this season has its own distinct flavor. Some of the music is somber, some is contemplative, and some is downright joyful. Our musical selections take us from traditional medieval chant to twentieth-century London and Paris.
Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. The texts and music for this day are a steep plunge into penitence after the last excesses of Mardi Gras. Byrd’s resonant Memento homo is a setting of the words said to the congregation one by one as ashes are placed on their heads: “Remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The official service books in Elizabethan England did not leave any room for smearing of ashes (or for elaborate singing in Latin), so this motet was sung as a private devotion in Byrd’s day. Rodrigo de Ceballos was a sixteenth-century musician who worked in a much warmer corner of Europe, in Seville and Malaga, where the orange blossoms were already in full flower during Lent. His motet Inter vestibulum et altare is taken from the rather severe Old Testament reading at the mass of the day.
The first Sunday of Lent has a gentler mood: in fact every piece of chant at the day’s mass, including the offertory Scapulis suis, is drawn from the distinctly calm and reassuring Psalm 91. The hymn Audi benigne Conditor is traditionally sung at vespers during this first part of the season. Dufay’s three-part setting alternates with the ancient chant melody. It is not far from the way that skilled fifteenth-century singers would have improvised on a piece of chant when left to their own devices.
The focal point of the second Sunday is the famous gospel passage describing the Transfiguration: “Jesus took Peter, James, and John, and led them up a high mountain, and he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white.” The communion antiphon Visionem sets his own words as he came down the mountain with his disciples. Tallis’s O nata lux is a poetic reflection on the same event. The offertory for the day, Meditabor in mandatis tuis, was set to music by the creative and prolific nineteenth-century organist Josef Rheinberger.
Estêvão Lopes Morago provided his colleagues with a large handwritten book of music for Lent, his Livro da Quaresma, which is still kept in his cathedral in Portugal 400 years later. It includes his rich and rather spicy setting of the introit Oculi mei for the third Sunday. The communion chant for this day, Passer invenit sibi domum, is perhaps best known for its words (featuring cameo appearances by the sparrow and the turtledove), but it is also an unusually lovely melody in its own right.
The fourth Sunday of Lent is just past the halfway mark of the season. It is known as Laetare Sunday, from the first word (“Rejoice”) of the introit Laetare Jerusalem, and it is observed as something of a break in the severity of Lent. There are rose-colored vestments instead of penitential purple, as well as opportunities for organ-playing and other musical extravagances. In England, this mid-Lent Sunday is still celebrated as the original Mother’s Day. Purcell’s I was glad sets one of the day’s most characteristic texts in English. He wrote it as an anthem for the coronation of King James II in 1685, to be sung as his choir walked in procession down the great central aisle of Westminster Abbey.
Things get much more earnest with the fifth Sunday of Lent, traditionally known as Passion Sunday, which begins the two-week season of immediate preparation for Easter. Statues and images in church are veiled with purple cloth, and the music takes a more serious turn. The communion chant Hoc corpus is already looking forward to the Last Supper and the Crucifixion. The same is true of Adoramus te Christe, a beautifully textured motet written by Monteverdi around 1615, when he was newly appointed as music director at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice and was given one of the most splendid buildings in Europe to fill with sound.
Our concert is taking place on Palm Sunday, just one week before Easter. It is a particularly memorable point in the Lenten journey. This morning’s Mass started as a triumphant celebration of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem and ended as a somber reflection on the Passion. George Malcolm composed the stirring processional hymn Ingrediente Domino for his own singers at Westminster Cathedral in London. We see the more melancholy side of the day’s liturgy in the traditional communion chant Pater si non potest and in Palestrina’s beautiful five-voice setting of the offertory Improperium (“my heart has expected reproach and misery…”) One particularly effective piece of Passion music is Antonio Lotti’s Crucifixus, which he wrote during his years as a fashionable Italian import in Dresden. He was best known in his own day as a composer of opera, and if J. S. Bach ever found time to go to the opera, it may well have been a production by Lotti.
Our program begins and ends with two very different versions of a Lenten classic. Attende Domineis a penitential prayer that is chanted in many churches during this season. Pierre Villette gave it a new musical setting in 1983. Villette won the top prize in harmony at the Paris Conservatoire (along with his classmate Pierre Boulez) and, like many of his contemporaries in the French avant-garde, he loved jazz. Those two facts more or less sum up what you will hear in his extraordinary motet. The basic theme is built on a whole-tone scale, but this is not a hazy Impressionist dream sequence: it develops into some pungent and uncanny harmonies. We were first introduced to this piece by our late colleague David Trendell, a great friend of Cantores in Ecclesia who loved all things French.