8pm Church of Ireland Collon
Dunedin Consort Bach Motets
Neil Metcalfe Consort Director
Collon Church provides the venue for Saturday evening’s concert where the Dunedin Consort make their Republic of Ireland debut. Winners of the 2008 Midem Baroque Award and the 2007 Classic FM Gramophone Award for Best Baroque Vocal Album for their recording of Handel’s ‘Dublin’ Messiah (Linn CKD 285), the Dunedin Consort, under the combined Artistic Direction of John Butt, Susan Hamilton and Philip Hobbs, have performed throughout Scotland and Europe.
The Consort has appeared at festivals in Belgium, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, and the Channel Islands as well as at Edinburgh International Festival. It has worked in collaboration with ensembles including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Sinfonia 21, Scottish Ensemble, Mr. McFall’s Chamber, Paragon Ensemble, Florilegium, La Serenissima and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, has appeared on the major BBC television channels, and been broadcast on Radio 3 and BBC Scotland.
For their inaugural concert in this part of the world, Dunedin Consort will perform a programme entitled “Bach’s Motets and his Forefathers”. J.S. Bach’s motets were seen as the pinnacle of virtuosic and expressive choral writing even in the late eighteenth century – a time when most of the composer’s output was entirely forgotten. Mozart famously enthused about ‘Singet dem Herrn’ and avidly studied its vocal parts, on a visit to Leipzig in 1789. Bach himself seems to have taken particular pride in the genre, distinguished by its use of singers on every line of music, with texts exclusively from the Bible or the Lutheran chorale tradition. Motets seem to have been cherished by the Bach family, and Sebastian was largely responsible for preserving the works of his elder relatives (it is likely that he requested J.C. Bach’s ‘Lieber Herr Gott’ to be sung at his own funeral). By hearing three of his greatest motets side-by-side those of the previous generations we can hear how the family craft developed towards what later commentators saw as the type of art that somehow transcends its original context and use. All the works are superbly crafted, but we can also hear considerable expressive character in the music of the earlier Bachs, such as Bach’s cousin, Johann Michael (who was also his father-in-law) and particularly in the motets of Michael’s brother, Johann Christoph. He was the organist in Eisenach at the time Sebastian lived there, and his music sounds almost Romantic in its extraordinarily direct expression.
Tickets €20 Concessions €15
For Box Office, contact Nicola on 087 6115679, or call into Ardee Town Council Offices on the Fair Green, Ardee.
