Three Choirs Festival

Vivaldi’s Gloria, his most famous choral piece, was composed in Venice for the choir of the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage for girls. It sets the text of the Gloria from the Latin mass in twelve short movements. Incredibly, it lay undiscovered for 200 years after Vivaldi’s death and was not performed until September 1939 in an edition described an ‘elaborazione’ (embellished). It was not until 1957 that the now familiar original version was published and given its first performance, just four years prior to Poulenc’s jazz-influenced Gloria (performed in our November concert).

This concert will also feature Haydn’s Mariazellermesse and Handel’s Eternal Source of Light Divine:

Joseph Haydn composed his Mariazellermesse in 1782 as a commission for the famous pilgrimage church of Mariazell, in Styria, Austria. It has always been one of his most popular works, written in a similar style to his famous Nelson Mass.

Composed as a birthday ode for Queen Anne in 1713, she was said to be ‘too careless or too busy to listen to her own band and had no thought of hearing and paying new players however great their genius or vast their skill.’ It’s not known whether she ever actually heard Handel’s ode, but nevertheless she granted him a pension of £200 a year, for life. The stunning opening movement of this work ‘Eternal source of light divine’ has become well-known in recent years after being featured at the opening ceremony of the Paralympics in 2012 and at a recent royal wedding.

Performers

Hereford Choral Society
Geraint Bowen conductor
Marches Baroque