The Camden Choir returns to its favourite venue – St Mary the Virgin, Primrose Hill, King Henry’s Road, NW3 3DJ – on Saturday 22 June at 7.00 pm to celebrate the end of a successful season with TWO feasts – one of music and the second a sumptuous buffet of Spanish and Italian dishes and wines. Please note the earlier start time and join us for a celebration of a very successful season.
Acclaimed as his masterpiece, Victoria’s Officium Defunctorum is a musical setting of the Office for the Dead, composed in 1603 for the funeral of the Dowager Empress Maria of Austria. It is scored for six-part chorus and starts with the Second Lesson of Matins: Taedet animam meam (Job 10:1–7). It then continues with the liturgy of the Requiem Mass, including all sections except the Dies Irae sequence. Although this work is sometimes referred to as Victoria’s Requiem, in fact he wrote another four-part Missa pro Defunctis, which he published in 1583.
Pope Julius III appointed Palestrina to be maestro di cappella (choir master) of the Cappella Giulia in St Peter’s, Rome, in 1551, from where he issued his first masses in 1554. Over the next 40 years, Palestrina composed 105 Masses, more than 300 motets, other sacred music and around 140 madrigals. A master of polyphony, his influence on J.S. Bach and many other composers was immense. The Missa Descendit Angelus Domini was published posthumously in 1600. It is based on a motet by Hilaire Penet, a French composer from Poitiers, who sang in the Cappella Giulia from 1514 to 1519.
The Choir’s founder and Musical Director Julian Williamson conducts this concert, with Nicholas Houghton playing his chamber organ.
