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“Canticum Canticorum”:
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 Concert Details and Ticket Information |
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Friday evening, October 28, 2011 | |||
| Pre-Concert Introduction at 7:15 | Concert at 8:00 pm | ||||
| Christ Church Cathedral | ||||
| 690 Burrard at West Georgia, downtown Vancouver | directions |
for information on Ticket Prices and Seating Plans.
Tickets for this performance at $35 (students & seniors $3 discount) can be ordered on-line via our secure connection.
These ticket prices include 12% HST.
They can also be ordered by phone (604 732-1610) from the office of Early Music Vancouver. Tickets are also available at Sikora’s Classical Records.
Rush Seats for Students with valid ID on sale for $10, at the door only, from 7:00 pm on the evening of the performance.
This concert is included in our “Bring a Youth for Free” programme.
< click on this logo for Chirst Church Cathedral’s listing of this Early Music Vancouver concert
| Programme |
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Roland de Lassus (c.1532-1594):
Motet Veni in hortum meum (Sacrae cantiones, 1562)
— for 5 voices & basso continuo
Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672):
Concerto Anima mea liquefacta est SWV 263 (Symphonae sacrae I, 1629)
Concerto Adjuro vos SWV 264 (Symphoniae sacrae I, 1629)
— for 2 tenors, 2 violins & basso continuo
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643):
Nigra Sum
— for tenor & basso continuo
Pur ti Miro (“L’Incoronazione di Poppea”)
— instrumental version
Ego Flos Campi
— for alto & basso continuo
Heinrich Schütz:
Motet “Ego dormio” SWV 63 (Cantiones sacrae,1625)
Motet “Vulnerasti cor meum” SWV 64 (Cantiones sacrae,1625)
— for 4 voices & basso continuo
Dietrich Buxtehude (c.1637/1639-1707):
Ad latus - Surge Amice Mea (Cantate IV in D minor from “Membra Jesu Nostri”)
— for 2 sopranos, alto, tenor, bass, 2 violins & basso continuo
i n t e r v a l
Domenico Mazzocchi (1592-1665):
Dialogo della cantica (Musiche sacre e morali, 1640)
— for soprano and echo soprano, 4 voices & basso continuo
Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704):
Dilecti mi H. 436 (manus, s.d.)
— for haute-contre, tenor, bass & basso continuo
Marin Marais (1656-1728):
Passacaille (Pieces en trio, 1692)
— for 2 violins & basso continuo
Marc-Antoine Charpentier:
Pulchra es et decora — “pour les vêpres de l’Assomption de la Vierge” H. 52 (manus., c.1687)
— for 2 high trebles, low treble & basso continuo
Henry Purcell (1659-1695):
Verse anthem “My Beloved Spake” Z. 28 (manus., c.1677)
— for alto, tenor, 2 basses, chorus, strings & basso continuo
– programme subject to changes
| Programme Notes |
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For love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as hell; the lights thereof are lights of fire and flames.— Song of Songs, VIII, 6The Song of Songs, which is one of the books of the Hebrew Bible and which Jan Doat, like many other commentators, regarded as “one of the most beautiful love poems of all time”, has long been attributed to King Solomon. Its composition was linked to his meeting with the Queen of Sheba or with his marriage to the pharaoh’s daughter. But, as is written in the Book of Kings, “King Solomon loved many foreign women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites [...]. To these, Solomon joined in love. And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines.” Given this, it is not necessary to add that the identity of the beautiful Shulamite will probably never be revealed to us, though her skin color tells us that she came from Africa.
In all likelihood, the Song of Songs is a compilation, made in the 4th century before our era, possibly by a single editor, of Hebrew, Syrian, Egyptian, or Moabite songs that were sung at wedding ceremonies and feasts. Some of them are linked to the Babylonian cult celebrating the cyclic loves of Ishtar and Tammouz. Anne Mars has claimed that it is not “a simple erotic song that, by oversight, wandered into the Old Testament”, but rather, according to those skilled in exegesis, a question of using sensual love as a metaphor for the love of God for his creatures. As Guillaume de Saint-Thierry testified in the 12th century: “At the time of giving to mankind the Song of Songs, the Holy Spirit dressed up the narrative, which at heart is entirely spiritual and divine, with imagery borrowed from carnal love, [because] only love fully understands divine things.”
From the first centuries of our era, the Jews began to consider the Song of Songs as a symbolic text that, in the words of Édouard Dhorme, evokes “the love of Jehovah for his people and the love of the people for their God.” The attribution to Solomon helped, Dhorme went on, because “it allowed the rabbis of the synod of Yabneh to classify this work of love poetry with the sacred books.” The rabbi Akiba testified to the esteem in which this work was held: “The world had neither value nor sense before the Song of Songs was given to Israel.” After singing this work in secular celebrations, the Jews, starting in the 5th century, included it as one of the five scrolls that they read at high holidays, and especially at Passover. Around 400, Saint Jerome translated the text into Latin. “Christian exegesis followed in the path mapped out by the Jews, with the Church and Christ replacing the synagogue and Yahweh in the expression of reciprocal love between the loving couple”, because, as Origen remarked at the same time, “if things are not to be understood spiritually, are they not unworthy of God?”
For several centuries, the unsettling erotic content of Canticles was, in very many commentaries, understood and interpreted as allegory. As Susan Byatt said, the text thus became “a metaphor for divine longing that would cause the wise soul to reject the flesh and its desires.” At the beginning or our era the female lover symbolized the sometimes sinful Church, the male lover symbolized Christ, whose tenderness never lessened, and, among other images, the little foxes ransacking the vines symbolized heretics. For Nilus Ancyranus, in the 5th century, the Shulamite was not a young virgin getting ready for marriage, but a prostitute who first refused conversion but then assented to it. Gregory the Great, for his part, saw in the text a representation of the eucharistic union — a union between partners in a relation of equality and intimacy, and not in a relation like that between master and servant. From the 12th century on, the female lover was associated, most frequently, with the Virgin Mary, or sometimes with Mary Magdalen. For Bernard of Clairvaux, she became the individual human soul attracted to Christ and his infinite love. These powerful metaphors were in circulation until the 17th century, when Isaac Lemaître de Sacy considered the text to be “a spiritual epithalamium [a poem written for a bride] that represents to us the sacred union of the husband par excellence and his wife, and whose true, literal meaning concerns the mystery of the Incarnation, of the Word being made flesh.”
The Song of Songs is no simple poem: it has a dramatic framework, it is divided into episodes, and several persons play a part in it. As Anne Mars wrote: “The spouses seek and lose each other, split up so as to better find their way back together again and, one after the other or as a duet, sing about the beauty of the person who has won their heart.” What is immediately striking is the extraordinary richness of the innumerable comparisons with which the poet, in impassioned language, tries to describe the physical beauty of the lovers. The female body is a garden, a city with its towers; the lips of the beloved woman are like threads of honey; her breasts like bunches of grapes, or twin fawns of a gazelle; her belly, a stack of wheat; her belly button, a wine cup. The beloved man is a bouquet of myrrh, an apple tree among the trees of the wood, or a gazelle. As Susan Byatt rightly remarked, “the effect is to make the wine and wheat richly present and the human body shadowy, vanishing, mysterious.” Thus, by a curious reversal, as if love is a pledge of abundance, “the more the metaphors are heaped up, the more they become interchangeable, the more desire which sings in the Song becomes a polymorphous celebration of everything.”
Over the course of the centuries, there have been innumerable exegeses, imitations, and paraphrases of the Song of Songs, and not just from religious authors; its poetic and amorous scenes have influenced numerous writers of all kinds. Many fragments of this beautiful text have been set to music. Taking advantage of its sensual and imagistic richness, several composers, both Catholic and Protestant, have, as Lino Bianchi wrote of Palestrina, “been able to capture in the heart of sound the transcendent emotions of the most arcane theology.” Some of this music belongs to the Marian cult. As Édouard Dhorme wrote, “the liturgy appropriates the most beautiful passages and applies them to the feasts of the Virgin or of virgins, following the principles of the allegorical method.” In a revival of the ancient sources of the Song of Songs, other extracts have been set aside as nuptial songs, so as to confer a spiritual dimension to the union between spouses.
Works that set to music passages praising the beauty of the bride, such as the Marc-Antoine Charpentier antiphony Pulchra es et decora, which was written “for the Vespers of the Assumption of the Virgin”, or recounting the invitation she received from her lover, such as the anthem My beloved spake, that Henry Purcell wrote in his teens, clearly belong to the first of these groups. To the second group belongs Domenico Mazzocchi’s Dialogo della cantica, published in his Musiche sacre e morali in 1640 to celebrate the marriage of Paolo Borghese and Olimpia Aldobrandini. In Mazzocchi’s text, a kind of imitation or paraphrase of the Song of Songs, the beloved man is clearly identified as Christ.
Whether these various musical settings use the techniques of Renaissance polyphony, as in the works of Palestrina and Lassus, or the expressive devices of the Baroque, such as those employed by Monteverdi, Schütz, Mazzocchi, and Purcell, one can say that all of them reconcile sacred and sensual love. Beyond the religious meaning that the text has acquired over the centuries, these settings also freely admit, according to André-Marie Gerard, “the literal interpretation according to which the Song of Songs is also and primarily ‘the word of God’ on the love that draws men and women to each other and reassured them in the vicissitudes of earthly life.”
Translated by Sean McCutcheon
| The Artists |
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Les Voix Baroques
Les Voix Baroques is an ensemble of vocal soloists specializing in works from the renaissance and baroque periods. Past projects include Bach's St. John Passion and St. Matthew Passion with Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, Bach cantatas with Ensemble Les Boréades, a tour of Germany with I Confidenti Berlin and a 2007 Juno-nominated and Opus award-winning Atma recording of Buxtehude's Membra Jesu Nostri with Les Voix Humaines and music director Alexander Weimann.
Les Voix Baroques has performed frequently for Early Music Vancouver, and has also appeared in concert for Festival Vancouver, the Boston Early Music Festival, Houston’s Mercury Baroque Orchestra, Montréal Baroque, the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, Nova Scotia's Music Royale, Sackville Early Music Festival, Domaine Forget, the Elora Festival and two Opus Award winning concerts produced by CBC for their McGill Concert Series. Highlights of this season, in addition to these performances, included a recording and West Coast tour of Bach's St. John Passion with Portland Baroque Orchestra under Monica Huggett, a three-concert tour of Colombia doing New World Baroque repertoire, the opening concert of the 2011 Boston Early Music Festival, Carissimi Oratorios for Le Festival de Musique Sacrée de Québec, concerts and a recording of the St. John Passion with Ensemble Arion for the Montréal Bach Festival and appearances in Seattle, San Diego, Edmonton, Calgary and Victoria and Vancouver.
Stephen Stubbs director
After a thirty-year career in Europe, musical director and lutenist Stephen Stubbs recently returned to his native Seattle to establish his new production company, Pacific Musicworks. The company received rave reviews in the national press for its inaugural production of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria in March 2009, which was designed and stage-directed by South African artist William Kentridge with the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa. In the coming Pacific Musicworks season, Stubbs will conduct Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers and Handel’s Esther. With his direction of Stefano Landi’s La Morte d’Orfeo at the 1987 Bruges festival, he began his career as opera director and founded the ensemble Tragicomedia. Stubbs has been invited to direct opera productions in Europe, the U.S., Canada, and Scandinavia. Since 1997, he has co-directed the biennial Boston Early Music Festival opera, and was named permanent artistic co-director in 2003. The Festival’s recordings of Conradi’s Ariadne, Lully’s Thésée, and Lully’s Psyché, have been nominated for Grammy awards in 2005, 2007, and 2008 respectively. In the 2010–2011 season, he will co-direct performances of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Handel’s Acis and Galatea, and Steffani’s Niobe. Stephen Stubbs created the ensemble Teatro Lirico, who made their recording début in 1996 with the CD Love and Death in Venice. Their début CD on ECM was a New York Times “pick of the year” for 2006. Stubbs’s solo lute recordings include the music of J. S. Bach, S.L. Weiss, David Kellner, and Jaques St. Luc. With Baroque harpist Maxine Eilander he has recorded Sonate al Pizzico, released on ATMA in 2004. He also appears on ECM with the Dowland Project. To cultivate the singers and players of the next generation he founded an early opera course called the Accademia d’Amore in 1997; it is now in Seattle under the auspices of the Seattle Academy of Opera. He will also head a new programme in early music at the Cornish College of the Arts.