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Music for Holy Week broadcasts on Radio New Zealand Concert this week

The Tudor Consort will be on the airwaves a fair bit this coming week as RNZ Concert broadcasts two Good Friday concerts from years gone by. On Monday 26 March at 7.30pm you can hear our Good Friday presentation from 2014, featuring settings of the Lamentation by Lassus, Tallis and Cardoso alongside the stunning ‘Stabat Mater’ of John Browne and William Byrd’s masterpiece ‘Ne irascaris Domine’. And at 1pm on Good Friday (a few hours before our next concert!) RNZ will broadcast last year’s concert - Music for Holy Week: The Desolate City, commemorating the wartime destruction of Dresden and Hiroshima, and the cry of the persecuted Catholic Church, lamenting the loss of the spiritual Jerusalem in Protestant England. Our Music Director Michael Stewart will also be interviewed on Upbeat at 1pm this coming Wednesday to talk about Eternal Sacrifice - stay tuned!

Saturday 24 March, 2018

Press release for 'Music for Holy Week - Eternal Sacrifice'

Hello everyone,

We are busy preparing for our next performance, the annual Good Friday presentation of Music for Holy Week. Please see below for the press release which gives some extra information about the concert, and hope to see you at Wellington Cathedral of St Paul on Friday March 30.

1 March 2018 - for immediate release

“The Palestrina…was sung so well it had an other-worldly feel. One felt transported to 16th century Rome.”
-Rosemary Collier, review of ‘Dona nobis pacem’, Saturday 16 September 2017

Music for Holy Week - Eternal Sacrifice

In this the centennial year of the end of World War I, The Tudor Consort puts a twist on its annual Good Friday presentation of Holy Week music to commemorate the fallen with a programme of works written during the Great War.

Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry may be best known for his stirring hymn Jerusalem and the coronation anthem I was glad, but undoubtedly his choral masterpiece was his Songs of Farewell. These profound settings of poems and scripture give voice to Parry’s suffering at the carnage going on over the Channel, as well as his own feelings as he neared the end of his life. Dedicated to ‘the undying memory of those who have fallen’, Harold Darke’s cantata As the Leaves Fall is a poignant setting of soldier-poet Lieutenant Joseph Courtney RAMC.

“Following on from last year’s ‘The Desolate City’, we are looking forward to broadening our Good Friday presentation by acknowledging the final year of the Great War” says Music Director Michael Stewart. “Parry’s Songs of Farewell are works of genius, building from the simple four part My soul, there is a country through to rich eight-part polyphony in the concluding Lord, let me know mine end. This promises to be a real treat for lovers of the best of British choral music.”

Poems from the Front by Wilfrid Owen and Siegfried Sassoon will be interspersed between these major works, as well as Lenten music from the rich treasury of English music including Henry Purcell’s Hear my Prayer, Orlando Gibbons’ Drop, drop, slow tears and Thomas Weelkes’ heartrending When David heard.

Music for Holy Week: Eternal Sacrifice
The Tudor Consort dir. Michael Stewart
Richard Apperley, organ
Wellington Cathedral of St Paul
Friday 30 March (Good Friday), 7.30pm (pre-concert talk at 7pm)
$30/$25

Door sales and online bookings at www.tudor-consort.org.nz

Wednesday 7 March, 2018