The Gregorian Singers

A Choral Aviary II

 

 

To mark the end of our 2016-17 season and to celebrate the return of Spring, on April 29 and May 1 we presented two performances of A Choral Aviary, a concert of music about birds, love, irony and the out-of-doors. We performed many of these pieces at last years’s Northern Voice Festival, and they were so much fun that we decided to reprise and expand that concert with more music and with the addition of acclaimed lutenist Phillip Rukavina.

 

The concert will included a French chanson, several English part-songs and Italian madrigals, as well as contemporary works. Highlights include Janequin’s famously onomatopoetic and complex chanson, Les chants des oyseaux, madrigals by Arcadelt, Monteverdi, Gesualdo and de Wert, and part-songs by Tallis and others. The Gesualdo piece, Ardita zanzaretta, from his exceptionally weird Sixth Book of Madrigals, features a mosquito rather than a bird, but is nevertheless appropriate for the out-of-doors in Minnesota. The more recent works include the delightfully odd and rarely-heard part-song Owls by Edward Elgar, the breathtaking Blue Bird by Charles Stanford, Samuel Barber's beautiful To be Sung on the Water, a part song by Hugo Distler, and Paul Hindemith’s Un cygne from his Six Chansons.