He’s also an award-winning composer who has studied with Morten Lauridsen. 1978), a native of Southern California, has been singing as a tenor with the Master Chorale since the 2009-10 season. The composer has also written of his inspiration by a still life of the Spanish Baroque painter Francisco de Zurbarán that uses ordinary material objects to project an “aura of mystery.”
Lauridsen’s through-composed setting expresses the epitome of what he terms “inner joy.” His study of the secrets of the Old Masters is apparent in such word-painting details as the unexpected harmonic coloration when the altos reach the word “virgo” - a G-sharp, the only note to “stray” from the harmonic background, which hints at the future suffering Mary will undergo. (It went on to become the highestselling item in the catalogue of Theodore Presser, distributor for Lauridsen’s publisher, Peermusic, since the company’s founding in 1783. Sally Horn, a Master Chorale alumna, writes in her memoir that Salamunovich introduced Lauridsen’s work as “the twentieth-century counterpart” of Victoria’s O Magnum Mysterium. The late Paul Salamunovich, then Music Director, explicitly compared the new setting the audience was about to hear on that occasion to that by Victoria, his favorite composer. Master Chorale co-founder Marshall Rutter (who was Board Chairman at the time) commissioned the piece during Lauridsen’s residency as a Christmas gift for his wife, Terry Knowles, current President and CEO. 1943) O Magnum Mysterium (December 18, 1994, to be exact). This month we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Morten Lauridsen’s (b. Scored for four parts, his treatment encompasses polyphonic density and awed chordal passages (as in O beata Virgo) and even a metrical shift for the concluding Alleluia. (He even served later in his career as a personal chaplain to royalty back in Spain.) His setting of O Magnum Mysterium was published in his first book of motets in 1572, when the composer was gaining fame as a gifted young chapel master in Rome. (Wagner used to juxtapose his setting of the Ave Maria as a two-part motet with the Gregorian chant version to launch his concerts.) Victoria synthesized his native Spanish religious devotion with the influences he had absorbed from the musical developments advanced by Palestrina in Rome as part of the Counter Reformation. Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611) was one of founder Roger Wagner’s signature composers. We hear three settings of this prayer, all with close associations to the Master Chorale and its history. Pithy, almost imagistic, they manage to convey the heart of the Christian idea of Incarnation - of the divine essence becoming manifest in our everyday, inglorious reality. There are only 23 words in this (anonymous) poem, including the joyful coda of Alleluia. Originally passed down via Gregorian chant, this is a prayer for Christmas Day intended for use during matins, the prayer cycle scheduled at the end of night leading right into dawn. It seems there’s been a recent Renaissance of choral settings of the very old Latin text O Magnum Mysterium. Pieces by Victoria and Gabrieli from the late Renaissance add historical perspective and remind us of the long tradition of joyful Christmas music - centuries before the noise pollution of holiday shopping medleys. In fact, most of the music we hear this evening dates from within just the past two decades. For that purpose, Artistic Director Grant Gershon has chosen works or arrangements for the most part by composers of the twentieth century and today - works that underscore the deep traditional roots of the choral art while also affirming that it remains a sphere of tremendously vibrant creativity today. This year’s a cappella Christmas program focuses on music as a vehicle for rejoicing in both senses, as the Master Chorale awakens a whole spectrum of joyful feelings in us. When we feel joy, we want to spread it, and that replication in turn intensifies the effect of joy. But along with that intransitive meaning, an old-fashioned connotation of rejoice is transitive, active - as in, to cause someone else to feel joy, and thus truly underscoring the infectious aspect of joy. The verb “rejoice” instantly conjures a state of being: the condition of feeling great joy or happiness (derived from the Latin noun for joy, gaudium).
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