HENRI TOMASI Fanfares Liturgiques for soprano, choir, and brass instruments
JAMES MACMILLAN Larghetto for orchestra
FRANCIS POULENC Stabat Mater for soprano, choir, and orchestra
Simona Šaturová soprano
Prague Philharmonic Choir
choirmaster Lukáš Kozubík
Filharmonie Brno
conductor Jaroslav Kyzlink
The opening concert of the 33rd Easter Festival features two Czech premieres. Fanfares Liturgiques were written by Henri Tomasi, a native of Marseille, originally as part of an opera, with the final fanfare with soprano solo already depicting the Good Friday procession in Seville in the original opera. Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan is currently one of the most frequently performed composers of classical music. In Larghetto, he reworked his own remarkable setting of the penitential psalm Miserere mei Deus for eight-part choir into an even more colorful one-movement orchestral composition, which is impressive even without knowledge of the original vocal work, but the melancholic and supplicatory psalm leaves a deep impression even in a purely instrumental setting. Poulenc’s Stabat mater is one of the most beautiful musical settings of this medieval sequence, relatively brief but all the more powerful for it.
The concert will be performed without intermission.
