A Concert from the Heart
by John Hoffacker
"Music from the Heart of Europe" was performed on May 18 & 19, 2002

Home cooking: There’s nothing like it. The real taste of what people love. In our May 2002 concert, we’re offering a banquet of music from the heart – music so genuine and beautiful, it will be like nothing you’ve heard before.

Our banquet has been prepared by master chefs, great composers who created masterpieces for the intimate sound of a virtuoso chamber choir. And our banquet has three courses: folk songs, sacred choruses, and, to conclude, a setting of the Mass for soloists, choir, and organ by one of the Romantic era’s great composers of religious music.

Béla Bartók chose four Slovak folk songs from the thousands he collected to arrange for mixed chorus and piano. Leos Janácek and Bedrich Smetana wrote music for men’s and women’s chorus respectively, also in the folk tradition, and we’ll present several stirring examples.

Music for the church makes up the second part of our program. Sergei Rachmaninoff, perhaps the greatest pianist of the twentieth century, in 1915 wrote one of the towering landmarks of sacred music, the Vespers, opus 37. We will sing the central motet of the Vespers, “Praise the Name of the Lord.” Following this and, in contrast to the glorious sonority of the Rachmaninoff motet, Igor Stravinsky’s quiet and simple setting of the “Hail Mary” prayer (in Church Slavonic) which lasts barely a minute.

And then we come to a thrilling moment for all of us in Cantemus – the American premier of a major work by the Czech Republic’s leading composer, Petr Eben. Prague Te Deum 1989 was written for the visit by Pope John Paul II to the city of Prague after the fall of the Iron Curtain. I’ll be giving a short talk before the concerts about this piece.

The second half of our program is the Mass in D, and the best word I can think of to describe it is delightful. Antonín Dvorák felt free of any requirement to write impressive music, since the Mass was commissioned for the consecration of a small rural church. It is full of lovely, homespun tunes, yet profound in its harmonic expression. The Mass is a heartfelt statement of faith by a master composer.