Baroque Holiday 2022

12th Annual Holiday Concert
Latin American Baroque

First Congregational Church, Madison
Dec. 11, Sunday: 2:45 pm lecture/3:30 pm concert

For our 12th Annual Holiday Concert, we’ll gather once again in the magnificent sanctuary of Madison’s First Congregational Church. This year we’ll celebrate with a program of Latin American Baroque masterworks. The concert will primarily feature sacred music by composers of remarkably diverse backgrounds: those born in Latin America, those born in Europe (Spain, Portugal, and Italy) but who worked in Latin America, and those who never traveled to Latin America but whose music was influential there. One of the favorite musical forms of this era was the villancico, and we’ll present two rhythmically intricate Christmas villancicos by Padilla who wrote several outstanding collections of them during the 1650s for the great cathedral in Puebla, Mexico. We’ll also perform two 18th-century villancicos by Guatemalan composer Castellanos, his Pastoras Alegres and Vaya de Jácaras, Amigos. And arching back to the early 16th-century, we’ll perform Fernandes’ lyrical, haunting hymn Xicochi, composed in the native Nahuatl language. The concert’s centerpiece will be the Mass to Saint Ignacio by Domenico Zipoli—born in Italy, but who worked in what is present-day Argentina—which ingeniously fuses learned and folk styles. Diego de Salazar’s audacious Salga el torillo hosquillo—whose text metaphorically entwines Christ’s birth with the releasing of the bull before a bullfight—is utterly enthralling and has to be heard to be believed! The concert will close with Zéspedes’ rhythmic Christmas night celebration, Convidando está la noche!

Estelí Gomez–SOPRANO, Clara Osowski–MEZZO-SOPRANO, James Reese–TENOR, Ryne Cherry–BARITONE, Kangwon Kim & Nathan Giglierano–VIOLINS, James Waldo–CELLO, Trevor Stephenson–HARPSICHORD, Timothy Steis–GUITAR, Sean Kleve–PERCUSSION