Honors Mass
When the students are gone on break, things get real quiet around here, and so we were "choir-less" for the past 2 Sundays. I was able to round up some students to delay their Thanksgiving break a bit to sing for a Diocesan "Honors Mass." It's a real big deal here, when laity are given awards, priests are raised to monsignors, monsignors to double-monsignors, etc. 23 of my students joined the cathedral choir and sang some nice stuff. Highlights include:
Processional:
Gregorian Introit
Sing to the Lord a New Song (Hal Hopson)
Ecce Sacerdos (Bruckner-instrumental)
Old 100th (arr. Vaughan Williams)
Offertory:
De Profundis (Gregorian)
Alleluia (Randall Thompson)
Communion:
Panis Angelicus (Palestrina)
Hymn of Thanksgiving:
All Creatures of Our God and King (arr. Rutter)
Some upgrades had just been made to the organ, so along with the brass, things were sounding pretty "festive" up in the loft. The choir sang well and I was glad that they were able to participate in such a "high" mass.
posted by Praying Twice @ 8:10 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I just looked at the Palestrina, having not heard of it before your post here. MERCY, I have never seen such a “Johnny-one-note” part as the baritone! I thought of transposing it up to A-flat to make it SATB-friendly, but the tenors would be on E-flat for almost the entire piece. A shame, because I have not often seen Palestrina that veers into the “dramatic” as much as on “pauper”, with those rests to set the words apart.
It's funny you should mention this. I had never heard the Palestrina either, and throughout rehearsals I was always thinking to myself, "This doesn't sound like him." I don't know if there's any debate in regards to attribution, but I'm a bit unconvinced that he composed it. I'm no scholar though . . .
The arrangement on CPDL is clearly for male choir, though we did an SATB version (which I believe is the original). It was scored in G, though I took it down a 1/2 step to ease the tenor tessitura.
Another interesting thing: I originally found it in an old edition lying around called "Easy Palestrina Motets." It differed in a few spots from the GIA edition that we ultimately performed (Basses and altos sing more F naturals as opposed to the F#'s in the older edition and the online edition). I would assume he wrote it in G mixolydian with the F naturals and some editors added the ficta. I'll try to hunt it down in the music library sometime . . .
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