Arts & Entertainment
Concordia Consort: Teares of a Sorrowful Soule, March 21 in Arlington
An hour of contemplative chorales and penitential psalms featuring Arlington resident Brian Warnock.
Concordia Consort (Sheila Beardslee, director; Nouri Newman & Brian Warnock, recorders) with guests Alan Karass, recorder and Eileen Cecelia Callahan, soprano, present “Teares of a Sorrowful Soule” on Saturday, March 21, 2015, at 4 pm at Calvary Methodist Church, 300 Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington, MA.
Suggested donation $15 ($10 seniors, students, early music society members). For further information, please call 781/859-5487 or visit http://www.concordiaconsort.com.
“Teares of a Sorrowful Soule” features Renaissance and early Baroque settings of chorales and psalms for Lent. The music is intense, harmonically biting and bittersweet in tone for this penitential season. Among the beautiful German chorale tunes included are “Vater unser im Himmelreich,” “Durch Adams Fall” and “O Lamm Gottes unschuldig” in simple hymn-like settings and transcriptions of complex organ chorale preludes. Included in the psalm settings are Hassler’s deeply chromatic “Ad Dominum tribularer,” Alessandro Scarlatti’s passionate “Ad te Dominum levavi animam meam” and Byrd’s heartfelt “Miserere mei.”
In addition to these psalms and chorales, the Consort is featured in fantasias and psalm settings by English composers Bull and Morley and Italian masters Cato and Lasso.
Arlington resident Brian Warnock, son of the noted stringed instrument maker Donald Warnock, learned recorder at age 10 and started playing regularly in his early teens, taking lessons with Dorothy Briel and later Sarah Cantor. He has played recorder with several ensembles in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, including Collegium Musicum Keene State College, Monadnock Chamber Players, Wilton Chamber Players, La Fontegara, and the BRS Performance Group. Brian has been a member of Concordia Consort since 2003.
Founded in 1995, Concordia Consort is the performing ensemble of Recorders/Early Music MetroWest, the metroWest’s participatory early music program. For nearly two decades, Concordia has contributed period music for churches throughout New England. Concordia has been heard in live broadcast on WCRB, WHRB and WGBH Radio and has performed concerts in historic King’s Chapel and St. Paul’s Cathedral in downtown Boston, at Middlesex Community College, MIT Chapel and Williams College, for the Concord Museum, and other venues.
Concordia Consort was featured in The Boston Boy Choir’s holiday concerts; in two concerts during the Museum of Science’s acclaimed Leonardo da Vinci exhibit, and for First Night performances in Boston and Portsmouth NH. Under Ms. Beardslee’s direction, Concordia’s players have toured Italy and Croatia with Ars et Amici, performing in Rome, Florence, Siena, Orvieto, Bolzano, Venice, Padua, Zagreb, Osijek, Djakovo, and other cities.
Named Ensemble-in-Residence at Trinity Episcopal Church in Concord, Concordia Consort frequently performs there on Sundays with the Parish Choir and in concerts during the year. Concordia has collaborated with Portsmouth (NH)-based Pavane Renaissance Dance Ensemble for a survey of Elizabethan music, dance and poetry, and often joins forces with members of Ars & Amici vocal ensemble. Guest soloists have included sopranos Eileen Cecelia Callahan and Harriet Bridges, countertenor Andrei Caracoti, and lutenist William Good. Concordia’s CD, “Ay me, Ohime!,” was released in 2009.
