2016-2017 Season
The Calgary Renaissance Singers & Players’ 2016-2017 season featured two headline concerts: Spring and Christmas.
PAST CONCERTS
CRSP Presents • Noé, Noé, Noël!
December 4, 2016 @ 7:30 pm
St. Stephen’s Anglican Church – 1121 14 Avenue SW, Calgary
To open our forty-sixth season with our first concert, CRSP explored the music of Old France and New France. Old France was represented by some French composers (Mouton, Costeley), a Franco-Flemish composer (Josquin des Prez), a Dutch composer who composed in the French polyphonic style (Sweelinck), and by at least one composer who was not at all French but who happened to write a beautiful, little-known gem in French (Orlando di Lasso and his La nuict froide et sombre.)
New France was represented by two Canadian composers (Peter Togni’s setting of Ave Maria and Eleanor Daley’s interpretation of The Huron Carol), arrangements of French carols by the Canadian musicologist and performer Ernest Gagnon, and The Huron Carol sung in the Huron language.
We were proud to be joined by the CRSP Players, a group of eight musicians led by the wonderful John van Leeuwen who played recorders, baroque oboe, bassoon, violin, viola da gamba, and harpsichord.
CRSP Presents • Renaissance Meets Klezmer!
May 7, 2017 @ 7:30 pm
St. Stephen’s Anglican Church (1121 – 14th Avenue SW, Calgary)
CRSP presented music by Jewish composers and on Jewish texts. This included two settings of Psalm 150, one by Srul Irving Glick and another by CRSP’s own Marcia Jenneth Epstein.
We also sang music by Felix Mendelssohn and by the Italian Jewish Renaissance composer Salamone Rossi, a musician whose works have experienced a recent revival.
Our Players performed instrumental works by Rossi, represented by a trio of baroque violin (Andrea Neumann), baroque recorder (John van Leeuwen) and baroque cello (Joan Kent.)
And in the second half of the concert, CRSP presented two beautiful songs from the Sephardic tradition, as well as performed a few traditional Isreali dances.
We wrapped it all up with a toe-tapping version of Bai Mir Bisti Sheyn as arranged by Joshua Jacobson, conductor of Boston’s Zamir Chorale.