Both programs also included:

  Mass in G Minor
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Les Chansons des Rose
 Morten Lauridsen
 A musical setting of poems
by Rainer Maria Rilke
      

Please see below for complete details.

SHREWSBURY CHORALE TO PREMIERE RECENTLY RECONSTRUCTED WORKS WRITTEN OVER FOUR HUNDRED YEARS AGO FOR ST. MARK'S IN VENICE

Works to be premiered include masterpiece by famed Venetian composer Giovanni Gabrieli.

The Shrewsbury Chorale will premiere choral works, written for St. Mark's in Venice, believed not to have been performed since their original composition and performance in the 1500s. The manuscripts, recorded in the sixteenth century by the famed Venetian publisher, Petrucci, have lain lost in Italian archives until their recent reconstruction. This premiere performance will be presented Saturday, May 22, 1999, at 8 p.m. at the First Presbyterian Church, 118 West Main Street, Freehold, N.J. and will be the third concert of the Chorale's 1998-99 season under the baton of Music Director, Stephen Michael Smith.

The works to be premiered include "O quam suavis est" (1597) by Giovanni Gabrieli and "Misereris omnium Domine" (1566) by Gioseffo Zarlino, Gabrieli's predecessor, and were written specifically for services at the world famous Basilica di San Marco in Venice. Also featured will be "Missa Fortuna desperata" (1503) by Jacob Obrecht, "Dic nobis Maria" (1598) by Giovanni Bassano, and "Audi Domine hymnum et orationnem" (1601) by Giovanni Croce. Of the five composers featured Obrecht was the only one to never hold a post at St. Marks. His inclusion in the Petrucci manuscripts indicates his works were held in high esteem at that time, would have been known to the musicians at St. Mark's, and were most likely performed in services at the basilica. The splendor and grandeur of the music written for St. Mark's was not only a reflection of the importance of the basilica as the spiritual center of the then powerful state of Venice, but also its focus as the city's cultural and political heart. Music for services reflected a liturgy unique to St. Mark's and incorporated a wide variety of musical styles befitting the unique architecture of the basilica as well as the elaborate ceremonial rites required for major feast days and visiting political dignitaries. Up to now very little has been known about the way the music for these occasions was actually brought to life in performance.

After years of research, musicologist Randolph Mickelson has found and assembled documents which have enabled him to reconstruct this music as it was performed in the sixteenth century. Under the guidance of Mr. Mickelson, The Shrewsbury Chorale and Music Director, Stephen Michael Smith, have prepared the premiere performances of these works. Mr. Mickelson's other reconstructions include Rossini's L'Assedio di Corinto at La Scala in Milan, Italy and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Handel's Semele at Carnegie Hall with Marilyn Horne, Kathleen Battle, Rockwell Blake, and Samuel Ramey, and L'Orfeo of Claudio Monteverdi which inaugurated the new Megalon concert hall in Athens, Greece.

Also on the program will be Ralph Vaughan Williams' a cappella work for double chorus, "Mass in G Minor." Written in 1922, by one of our century's most important composers, the Mass exemplifies the simple, yet transcendent, style associated with this English master.

Completing the program will be Morten Lauridsen's song cycle "Les Chansons des Roses" (1993), a musical setting of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. Lauridsen's own comments about his inspiration in using Rilke's poems clearly reflect his own compositional choices in these settings, "...[Rilke's] poems on roses struck me as especially charming, filled with gorgeous lyricism, deftly crafted and elegant in their imagery. These exquisite poems are primarily light, joyous and playful, and the musical settings are designed to enhance these characteristics and capture their delicate beauty and sensuousness." Morten Laurdisen, a native of the Pacific Northwest, is Chairman of the Composition Department at USC's School of Music in Los Angeles and is Composer-in-Residence of the Los Angeles Master Chorale.