Join Belle Voci

and members of the

CSO
for an intimate presentation of 

Jesu meine Freude & Advent Messiah!

Friday December 11, 2020

7:30 PM
St James Catholic Church
2777 Townline Road
Abbotsford

Saturday December 12, 2020
7:30 PM
Location to be determined

Sunday December 13, 2020
7:30 PM
Sts Joachim & Ann Catholic Parish
2826 272 Street
Aldergrove

With members of

The Chilliwack Symphony Orchestra
on baroque instruments

Tickets are $40 each
and must be pre purchased

(Only 30 tickets available for each presentation)

 Handel’s Messiah!

“One of the special challenges in performing Messiah year after year is to keep the work sounding fresh, as if one had just discovered it,” notes Chilliwack Symphony Orchestra and Chorus music director, Paula DeWit. “It is a joy for many listeners to experience a more detailed, articulate style and quicker tempos based on Baroque dance rhythms and speech patterns.”
“Today, such an interpretation is much more common among both period and modern orchestras, and it is no longer surprising. Instead, a listener can focus on the drama of the work and how a particular performance presents it,” adds Ms. DeWit. “I personally have found it satisfying to return to the work each year, not so much to perform various versions of it or to consciously try to do something ‘different,’ but rather to discover more details and thus provide a greater depth in the music. For me, that is what makes it perpetually ‘new.’ It quite literally sparkles! A work such as Messiah is truly inexhaustible. Historically, its beauty is everlasting and keeps audiences coming back year after year. For many, annual attendance at a performance of Handel’s Messiah has become an established and favoured family tradition as an important part to the onset of Christmas festivities.”  We are thrilled to have the CSO musicians play on baroque period instruments this year.  And we are excited to be performing in A415.  A real treat for us!

Bach, Jesu meine Freude!

One of J. S. Bach’s most monumental motets, Jesu meine Freude is a work of incredible musical and theological depth. Throughout the work, Bach draws the listener (originally his congregation members) into an intensely personal focus by weaving together scriptural and chorale texts with incredibly evocative music. There is a theme of transformation that underpins the work through all eleven movements. Many of the individual movements begin in a minor mode and conclude tonally with a major resolution. This “minor to major” transformation is a symbolism for the Christian faith. The progression of texts and music fully expose our human weaknesses and fears, but Bach always resolves them—a symbolic representation of his deep faith in the comfort of a loving God.

This particular motet is also a work of genius compositional construction. The work itself is a palindrome, with each movement being reflected from the middle (movement #6) outward. This form also gives the work a palpable direction— possibly representing the linear direction or journey of one’s faith within human existence, and also metaphorical direction which, for Bach, points upward to God in Heaven, the ultimate source of comfort in this life and the next.

Bach composed each of his six motets in the “old style,” (stile antico) which simply means that there is not an independent orchestra accompanying as there is in his cantatas and major works. The absence of orchestral accompaniment places the responsibility for dramatic characterization and contrast solely in the hands of the voices. This is both challenging and thrilling at once—the possibilities for expressing the rhetorical connection between text and music are limitless and the choir assumes the role of both musician and preacher. For Bach, this was no light mission—he was determined to convince people of the love and comfort found through the presence of God and the Holy Spirit. And thus he dedicated his entire life’s work Soli Deo Gloria, “to the Glory of God alone.”