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O vos insipientes mortales
Oct. 29th, 2017 11:25 amI headed in to London yesterday afternoon to meet up with Mrs Q, who had been to the Scythian exhibition at the British Museum. Prior to the concert we had a meal at Erebuni - a Russian/Armenian/Georgian restaurant near Barbican. I enjoyed the Chanakhi, which I found sufficiently similar to my own efforts from the Georgian cookery book we have at home to recognise it. The service was a bit slow but we had plenty of time and it wasn't a problem.
We headed across the City to St-Botolph-without-Aldgate for The Fourth Choir's concert titled Chiesa d'Oro. The first half of the concert was music from or influenced by Venice of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some numbers were a capella, others accompanied by a theorbo. Among works by Schütz, Giovanni Gabrieli, Barbara Strozzi, and Monteverdi, I particularly enjoyed Giovanni Legrenzi's O vos insipientes mortales and an altogether darker piece by Flemish composer Giaches de Wert, Valle che de'lamenti miei se piena. The second half was of contemporary music inspired by "the stars"; I enjoyed it more than expected, particularly James Macmillan's O Radiant Dawn and Bob Chilcott's Sun, Moon, Sea and Stars - the latter a light piece proving far better than his insipid arrangements of folk songs that have sometimes featured at the Last Night of the Proms. Unconventionally, the concert ended on a beautiful but dark note: Kim André Arnesen's Even When He is Silent was a moving setting of an anonymous poem scratched onto a wall of a concentration camp by a victim of the Holocaust.
We headed across the City to St-Botolph-without-Aldgate for The Fourth Choir's concert titled Chiesa d'Oro. The first half of the concert was music from or influenced by Venice of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some numbers were a capella, others accompanied by a theorbo. Among works by Schütz, Giovanni Gabrieli, Barbara Strozzi, and Monteverdi, I particularly enjoyed Giovanni Legrenzi's O vos insipientes mortales and an altogether darker piece by Flemish composer Giaches de Wert, Valle che de'lamenti miei se piena. The second half was of contemporary music inspired by "the stars"; I enjoyed it more than expected, particularly James Macmillan's O Radiant Dawn and Bob Chilcott's Sun, Moon, Sea and Stars - the latter a light piece proving far better than his insipid arrangements of folk songs that have sometimes featured at the Last Night of the Proms. Unconventionally, the concert ended on a beautiful but dark note: Kim André Arnesen's Even When He is Silent was a moving setting of an anonymous poem scratched onto a wall of a concentration camp by a victim of the Holocaust.