The Southwark Consorts of Winds

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• J S Bach - Ricercar
• Arcangelo Corelli - Concerto Grosso XI
• Henry Purcell - 'My Heart is inditing'
• Josquin des Pres - Missa Pange Lingua
• Giovanni Gabrieli - Canzon Septimi Toni a 8
• Tomas Luis de Victoria - Mass a 6
• John Dunstable - Preco Preheminencie
• William Byrd - Mass in Five Voices
• Giovanni Pergolesi - Stabat Mater
• Guillaume Machaut - Mass of Our Lady
• Giovanni Palestrina - Pope Marcello Mass
• Claudio Monteverdi - Ave Maris Stella
• Giovanni Gabrieli - Sacrae Symphoniae No. 10

In 1746 Frederick the Great extended an invitation to Johann Sebastian to visit the Prussian court in Berlin. In the spring of 1747 the elderly composer arrived in Potsdam where he was received graciously, if not deferentially, as shown by Frederick's (or Carl Philip Emanuel's) calling him "Old Bach."

The guest was immediately asked to test Frederick's new Silbermann fortepianos and the ensuing display of technique was impressive enough for the emperor to propose a musical subject upon which Bach was requested to improvise a fugue. If contemporary accounts are to be believed, Johann Sebastian improvised at that time two fugues: one for three voices and one for six - the latter is the basis of the arrangement we will perform. Upon his return to Leipzig, Bach added to the fugues a strict set of canons and a trio sonata featuring the "royal theme" in the flute part (Frederick's own instrument) which he had engraved and sent to the king.

Corelli exercised a wide influence on his contemporaries and on the succeeding generation of composers. Born in 1653, a full generation before Bach or Handel, he studied in Bologna, a distinguished musical center, then established himself in Rome in the 1670s. By 1679 had entered the service of Queen Christina of Sweden, who had taken up residence in Rome in 1655, after her abdication the year before, and had established there an academy of literati that later became the Arcadian Academy.

History has remembered him with such titles as the "World's First Great Violinist" and the "Father of the Concerto Grosso." Although Corelli was not the inventor of the Concerto Grosso principle, it was he who proved the potentialities of the form, popularized it, and wrote the first great music for it. Through his efforts, it achieved the same pre-eminent place in the baroque period of musical history as the symphony in the classical period. Without Corelli's successful models, it would have been impossible for Vivaldi, Handel, and Bach to have given us their Concerto Grosso masterpieces.

The Concerto Grosso form is built on the principle of contrasting two differently sized instrumental groups. In Corelli's, the smaller group consists of two violins and a cello, and the larger of a string orchestra.

Of all his compositions it was upon his the 12 concertos of Opus 6 that Corelli labored most diligently and devotedly. Corelli spent many years of his life writing and rewriting this music, beginning while still in his twenties.

Purcell was commissioned to write this ode for the coronation of James II in 1685. He was the brilliant young musical star of his day and England was then a rising European power. His style drew on those of his teachers, and in turn on the previous golden age of English music under Elizabeth and James I. After his premature death, English music was largely overwhelmed by the fashion for music seen as in the Italien style, including that of Handel. This arrangement is made up of the opening 'sinfonia' for strings, followed by the first parts of the choral ode. It is an excellent example of Purcell's remarkable facility in setting English words in a directly expressive way. James II squandered the initial welcome he received, and fled the country four years later.

Kyrie, Christe, Kyrie II

Josquin des Pres was recognisd as the leading composer of the early sixteenth century. His music draws on the Flemish and northern French traditions, and firmly established melodic imitation between the voices - heard clearly in the opening movement of the mass based on the plainchant Pange Lingua - as a fundamental method of constructing polyphonic music.

Gabrieli's Sacrae Symphoniae, published in 1597, contains 45 vocal and 16 instrumental compositions. The instrumental works are mostly intended for two antiphonal groups, each of 4 or 5 instruments. Usually the instruments are not named, but for one work (similar in style to the present one) cornetts and sackbuts are specified. Gabrieli's are the earliest antiphonal works ever published, and probably the earliest ever written. The one that we are playing today is transposed up a minor third to adapt it to the available instruments. The "7th mode" of the title is the Myxolydian, differing from the modern major only in having the leading note flattened. This is the mode (with tonal centre E flat in our transposed version) in which the work begins and ends, but it has episodes that imply B flat Lydian, F Dorian, and C Ionian. Episodes outside the principal mode are common in Gabrieli's writing.

Written in memory of the Empress Maria, Victoria's employer, this Mass was Victoria's last work and masterpiece. It is a Requiem for both the Empress, a true 'Renaissance Woman', but also for the musical style of the Renaissance, then rapidly being replaced by the early Baroque style of composers such as Monteverdi.

John Dunstable is probably the most important English composer in the history of music. As the Middle Ages moved towards the Renaissance, the development of the 'English Consonance' - a sweeter sounding harmony in thirds, rather than the more austere sound of harmony in fourths and fifths, played a fundamental role in opening up new possibilities in musical expression. Dunstable was the foremost exponent of the style.

Kyrie, Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei

William Byrd, as a Catholic in Elizabethan and early Jacobean England, had to watch his step. In spite of being established as the most prominent musician of his time, he was repeatedly fined for his religious beliefs. His religious music, consequently, has a private character, and in fact was written for performance in small ceremonies, almost in secret, in the houses of the Catholic nobility - a far cry from the sumptuous catherdral masses written by Italian composers during the same period.

Numbers 1, 2, 4, 11, and 12

Pergolesi was commissioned to write his Stabat Mater for a private ceremony for a group of the Neopolitan nobility. It replaced a work by Scarlatti, considered to be old-fashioned, but the new piece divided opinions, being hailed as a masterpiece and condemned as vulgar. It reflects a more directly personal form of religious devotion, and has a directness and power of emotional expression which may have seemed tasteless to people accustomed to more restrained music.

Kyrie II and III, Agnus Dei

These are extracts from the earliest recorded musical setting of the Mass by one composer. Written in a way which draws on the stark beauty of plainchant, but using the new resources of harmony opened up a hundred years earlier by the development of musical notation.

Kyrie, Christe, Kyrie II, Sanctus, Agnus Dei II

In the late sixteenth century the leaders of the Catholic Church were gathered for a Council at Trent in Italy, to purge the abuses which had grown up in the church and fight back against the Protestant Reformation. It was said that they might ban polyphonic music such as this. Palestrina certainly wrote this mass for the event, and it is said that, on hearing its beauty and clarity of word setting, they relented. The Mass was written for six voices. We will be playing an arrangement of three of the best known sections of the Mass.

Verso I, Verso II or V, Ritonello I, Ritonello III, Verso III, Verso VII

These are extracts from the hymn of praise which forms a part of "Monteverdi's Vespers". The Vespers alternate antiphonal choral sections, solos, and instrumental replies. We will be performing examples of each. Antiphonal performance, with musicians on the opposite sides of a church, was common practice at the time.

Canzon duodecimi toni a 10

This canzona for ten unspecified instruments, placed in two antiphonal groups, is one of the 16 instrumental and 45 vocal compositions published in 1597 under the title Symphoniae Sacrae by Giovanni Gabrieli, organist at St.Mark's cathedral in Venice. For the present peformance it has been transposed up a minor third, and near the end the two highest parts have been exchanged to allow the flute to be above the oboe.