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Stephen Watkins presents music and texts that seek to enlighten the path untravelled, the idea unravelled. JS Bach leads. Others (and often the unexpected) follow. The seasons are reflected and the hour is respected with space and contemplation.
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Vespers for Annunciation in liturgical dress honour a 400-year musical landmark
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A Prodigal Son's confession is this week immortalised by motets and a mass from 16th century Europe.
Three composers who may celebrate their quincentenary this year stand side by side in delivering the cry of the Prodigal Son, that Middle Eastern youth who defiled culture and his father’s social standing by demanding his inheritance before his father’s death and squandered it in the company of infidels. The parable tells that, on return, penniless, he cried ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; therefore I am not worthy to be called your son’. Dominique Phinot, Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance, active in Italy and France, and his contemporary Clemens non Papa offer motets on this moving text, and then follows a very Venetian parody mass by Andrea Gabrieli (uncle of Giovanni) on his setting of Pater peccavi. All three may this year celebrate the quincentenary of births in 1510. With Duarte Lobo, the leading Portuguese composer of that country’s Golden Age of polyphony leading, the first hour of For the God Who Sings is then a reflective cry of an enduring story of forgiveness, a story that shines a rose-coloured light upon an otherwise fast that’s traditionally been clothed in deep purple. In fact roses may adorn an altar and offer fragrance of forgiveness for this fourth Sunday of Lent, Laetare Sunday.
The second hour offers a different musical hue. It’s Arthur Sullivan’s rather more Romantic oratorio of 1869 for London audiences in Lent, which dramatises in music the parable of The Prodigal Son.
Lenten Friday nights in mid-18th century Milan attracted Italian, Spanish and Austrian lay religious to subscription concerts to hear a sermon and cantata at a church founded by the Spanish Government in a city under Austrian rule. One of eight cantatas by Giovanni Sammartini for these concerts is 'The Tears the Angels of Peace'. The tears are of three angels, headed up by the Angel of the Alliance (the 'bearer of promise'). Political alliances were tenaciously held and just as tenuously maintained, as history reveals: Turkey threatened Europe, but Napoleon soon shattered borders; in Milan he declared himself 'King of Italy'. The other two angels in Sammartini's cantata are the Angel of the Testament ('Minister of Peace to the Children of Israel') and so-called Angel of Grace. Each shed tears over the 'beastly implements of death' that crushed the spiritual temple that Christians claim was then rebuilt at Easter. The cantata is introduced by Sir John Tavener's 'Tears of the Angels' for the suffering in the Balkans. All are set in the context of a garden, where the plight of a lone fig tree is dependent upon its good nurture, grace and autumnal fruitfulness: music by Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Whitacre and Purcell.
Music played on For The God Who Sings with Stephen Watkins on March 14 | 7 | February 28 | 21 | For earlier dates, start at the index of Archived Music Details.
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