Hope Metropolitan Orchestra and Singers: A Box of Delights

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NB: This concert will take place in the Great Hall at Liverpool Hope University Creative Campus, 17 Shaw Street, Liverpool L6 1HP.

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Hope Metropolitan Orchestra and Singers: A Box of Delights: Music from the Baroque and Beyond

Hope Metropolitan Orchestra, Stephen Pratt, Conductor
Hope Metropolitan Singers, Richard Lea, Director
Eleanor Kelly, Guitar
 
Durante - Magnificat
Carulli - Guitar Concerto Op 140
Lully/Pratt - Suite from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
Unaccompanied choral pieces include:
Charpentier - Veni Creator Spiritus
Rameau - Hymne a la Nuit;
Malipiero - Vivaldiana
Hartwell - Over
 
Of all the ‘periods’ of classical music, the Baroque seems to have proved one of the most fertile grounds for composers since – finding its way into popular music (eg. Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale, and The Farm’s Altogether Now), jazz (Jacques Loussier’s many reworkings of Bach) and even hip-hop versions of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. Despite the presence of names like Lully and Rameau, this programme only includes one work in the form in which it was written in the baroque period (c.1650-1750). That is the four-part version of Durante’s Magnificat, and although the date of composition is unclear it was almost certainly composed in the first quarter of the C18th.

So what of the rest? The touching melody of Rameau’s Hymne à la nuit taken from his 1733 opera Hippolyte et Aricie was popularised following its appearance in the film La Cage aux Rossignols (The Nightingale Cage) in 1945. The Carulli Guitar Concerto was first published in 1820. The style of the writing and the orchestration belong more to the early classical period, but the three-movement shape is very much a product of the baroque period. The Lully and Malipiero works both take themes and harmonies from their originals, but rework them to different degrees. Malipiero came across the Vivaldi themes employed in his Vivaldiana following his editing of the composer’s works in the early 1950s. Stephen Pratt's reworking (largely rescoring) of the extracts from the Lully opera, has taken a somewhat more conservative approach, with a few sneaky additions!