Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir to Present CHORAL SPLENDOURS: BACH & ZELENKA

Ivars Taurins will direct Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir in a program that celebrates the musical friendship between two great baroque composers. Choral Splendours: Bach & Zelenka features soprano Myriam Leblanc and takes place on March 28 & 29 at 8 PM and March 30 at 3 PM at Jeanne Lamon Hall. 

Amongst the composers Bach most admired was the Bohemian Jan Dismas Zelenka — theirs was a mutual admiration enriched by friendship. Choral Splendours explores that friendship, pairing a selection of lesser-known, intimate gems from Bach's Lutheran cantatas 45, 150, and 151 with an extravagant Catholic mass by Zelenka.
 
Myriam Leblanc's soprano is “perhaps the most beautiful voice to come out of Québec in the past 10 years” (Samedi et rien d'autre). Leblanc is featured in the Zelenka Mass and sings a beguiling aria from Bach's Cantata 150.
 
“We know that Bach held Zelenka's music in high esteem, which is fascinating to me, as the character of their respective musical styles is so different,” says Ivars Taurins. “Both were highly accomplished, innovative composers who wrote masterful, complex works, but Zelenka's music is more idiosyncratic, eccentric, and extrovert: at once charged with an unusual emotional intensity, and then utterly charming and capricious.”
 
Tafelmusik has presented four of the five highly original high Masses Zelenka composed in the final decade of his life, and these performances of the Missa Sanctissimae Trinitatis complete the cycle of these extraordinary works. With its virtuosic demands on the performers, vivacious rhythms, eccentric harmonies, and deep emotional impact, the Mass bears Zelenka's unmistakable personal stamp.