Bi-College Chamber Singers to Perform
With Baroque Orchestra

On Sunday, April 1, the Philadelphia-based Baroque orchestra Tempesta di Mare will assemble its 20 artists at Haverford to perform Hoshanna! Hebrew Music of the High Baroque with the 30-voice Chamber Singers of Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges.

The program features recently discovered 18th-century works for soloists, chorus and orchestra, composed in Hebrew in the styles of Handel and Haydn for Jewish communities in Italy and the Netherlands. Musicologist Francesco Spagnolo will give a preconcert talk starting at 3 p.m.; the concert begins at 4.  Both events will be held in Roberts Hall, Marshall Auditorium, on the Haverford College Campus and are free and open to the public thanks to the John B. Hurford '60 Humanities Center.  For more information call (610) 896-1011.  

The music of Hoshanna! symbolizes an extraordinary intersection of Jewish ceremony and Western art music during the Enlightenment, an era of peace and curiosity among cultures.  The program's centerpiece, "Elyon, Melits u-Mastin" ("God, Defender and Accuser"), is an anonymous Handel-style oratorio for three soloists, chorus and orchestra composed for the Italian Ashkenazik synagogue of Casale Monferrato in 1773. Another featured work is G.C. Lidarti's "Kol Haneshama" for solo soprano and orchestra, a virtuosic setting of Psalm 150 reminiscent of Mozart's famous "Exsultate Jubilate" that was commissioned for the Sephardic community of Amsterdam in about 1770.  Both works will receive their U.S. premieres in the performance at Haverford.

Flutist Gwyn Roberts, lutenist Richard Stone and violinist Emlyn Ngai will lead Tempesta di Mare's celebrated 20-piece baroque orchestra of brass, woodwinds, strings, lute and harpsichord. Vocal soloists are international Yiddish operetta star Nell Snaidas, soprano, Metropolitan Opera National Council winner and local cantor Sheryl Heather Cohen, soprano, and acclaimed Bach specialist David Newman, bass. The Chamber Singers of Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges, Thomas Lloyd, director, will provide the choral forces.

Tempesta di Mare is an Ensemble-in-Residence at Haverford College with the John B. Hurford '60 Humanities Center.

<Back to Bryn Mawr Now 3/29/2007

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