Our Exciting 2025-2026 Season: Program Notes
/Fall Concert: Baroque & Classical Masters
Vivaldi – Magnificat, RV 610
Salieri – De profundis
Mozart – Mass in C, KV 220 “Sparrow”
Vivaldi, Salieri, Mozart: What unites these three composers was a forward-looking creativity that took music on to its next era – even beyond. All three stand out for their contributions to instrumental music, but what connects them equally deeply is their vocal music – operatic and sacred.
Il prete rosso (The Red-Haired Priest), as Vivaldi was known, produced choral music that is both intensely expressive and sensitive vocal writing, He was one of the late Baroque composers who laid a solid foundation for Salieri and Mozart. The rivalry between the latter two seems largely a fiction that has overshadowed Salieri’s excellent reputation – as a composer of operas, but also of a very considerable body of sacred and secular choral music.
The choral works on this program focus on the sacred vocal music at which all of these masters excelled. They display their genius for encapsulating deep meaning and emotion in very compact forms.
Spring Concert: East Meets West
Nami Nazar – “Under the Persian Sky” (World première, SGCS commission)
Holst – Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda
The 21 st -century Nami Nazar and 20 th -century Gustav Holst are united and complemented musically by both non-Western and Western environments and influences.
Nami Nazar, while studying violin at Juilliard, has already attracted attention as a composer and conductor. He has composed for and conducted the Pars Symphony Orchestra in Iran, as well as having created music for visual media. As Mr. Nazar states himself he “aims to represent Iranian-born artists … through his work as a film composer.” SGCS is honored to offer the world première of Under the Persian Skies by this multi-talented young musician.
Gustav Holst looked to the East for inspiration in his Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda, Op. 26, four groups composed between 1908 and 1912. His inquiring mind led him far afield from English sources, including an interest in Hindu literature that lead to his composing music such as his Op. 24 set, based on the Rig Veda, for accompanied solo voice, and the Op. 25 one-act chamber opera Savitri. The Op. 26 four-set compendium for choral ensembles, based on Holst’s own translations from the Rig Veda, is striking in the variety of choral combinations he used to open the words up to an immense variety of vocal colors.
