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enevarimLatest Tafelmusik concert was Lotti Revealed, including a little-known-today-though-copied-out-by-hand-by-Zelenka-and-Bach-and-Handel-and-liberally-stolen-from-by-all-three missa brevis called (by Zelenka, as that is the earliest named copy that survives) the Missa Sapientiae, and the pre-concert lecturer, Kate Helsen, wondered aloud if that name suggested itself from the O Sapientia antiphon for December 17,
(as sung by a flash mob in a library, because why not?)
And went on to demonstrate how it might have been copied and recopied as a concise collection of musical ideas from the previous several centuries, from the downright modern (for the early eighteenth century) back to plain chant, hence “from one end to another”, and further demonstrated the musical borrowings that all three composers made from it, hence, perhaps, the teaching reference.
Bach's Sanctus was one of the other pieces on the program, and my appreciation of a Sanctus is always slightly inflected by the 2002 Macbeth with Sean Bean (and Julian Glover as Duncan), where the witches were on the balcony singing “Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus” at Macbeth's coronation. It was deeply disconcerting. (Also, no, that wasn't the teleprompter Macbeth – that was another one again.)
An interesting thing Tafelmusik is doing this year is commissioning new pieces for each concert, and for this concert they got James Rolfe to create Kadosh / Sanctus / Holy, which was another interesting reframing of the Sanctus, in three languages, Hebrew and Latin and English, where sometimes one language was distinctly heard and sometimes they felt like the different languages were responding politely each to the other and sometimes they were all blended together. It felt profoundly hopeful.
And it reminded me of the Sicily: Culture and Conquest exhibit at the British Museum from 2016, where I first heard of Roger II, King of Sicily 1130-54, who seems to have had an Alfredian willingness to / interest in gathering scholars from many different lands and listening to them. And from this period there were manuscripts like the Harley Trilingual Psalter, with the Psalms in Greek and Latin and Arabic.
And perhaps that multicultural and tolerant milieu, as the exhibition catalogue suggests, may have been “only or mainly at the court”, and perhaps it didn't endure after Roger and his immediate successors, but, again, it felt profoundly hopeful.
O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,
attingens a fine usque ad finem,
fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia:
veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.
O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to the other,
mightily and sweetly ordering all things:
Come and teach us the way of prudence.
(as sung by a flash mob in a library, because why not?)
And went on to demonstrate how it might have been copied and recopied as a concise collection of musical ideas from the previous several centuries, from the downright modern (for the early eighteenth century) back to plain chant, hence “from one end to another”, and further demonstrated the musical borrowings that all three composers made from it, hence, perhaps, the teaching reference.
Bach's Sanctus was one of the other pieces on the program, and my appreciation of a Sanctus is always slightly inflected by the 2002 Macbeth with Sean Bean (and Julian Glover as Duncan), where the witches were on the balcony singing “Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus” at Macbeth's coronation. It was deeply disconcerting. (Also, no, that wasn't the teleprompter Macbeth – that was another one again.)
An interesting thing Tafelmusik is doing this year is commissioning new pieces for each concert, and for this concert they got James Rolfe to create Kadosh / Sanctus / Holy, which was another interesting reframing of the Sanctus, in three languages, Hebrew and Latin and English, where sometimes one language was distinctly heard and sometimes they felt like the different languages were responding politely each to the other and sometimes they were all blended together. It felt profoundly hopeful.
And it reminded me of the Sicily: Culture and Conquest exhibit at the British Museum from 2016, where I first heard of Roger II, King of Sicily 1130-54, who seems to have had an Alfredian willingness to / interest in gathering scholars from many different lands and listening to them. And from this period there were manuscripts like the Harley Trilingual Psalter, with the Psalms in Greek and Latin and Arabic.
And perhaps that multicultural and tolerant milieu, as the exhibition catalogue suggests, may have been “only or mainly at the court”, and perhaps it didn't endure after Roger and his immediate successors, but, again, it felt profoundly hopeful.
