Music for November 20, 2016 + Christ the King Sunday

Vocal Music

• Christus Factus Est – Felice Anerio (c.1560-1614)
• The Crucifixion – Samuel Barber (1910-1981) Jade Panares, soprano

Instrumental Music

• Organ Concerto in A Minor BWV 593 after Vivaldi RV 522 – J. S. Bach (1685-1750)
• I. Allegro
• II. Adagio
• Menuet Gothique from Suite Gothique, Op.25 – Léon Boëllmann (1862 – 1897)

Congregational Music (all hymns from the Hymnal 1982 with the exception of those marked “R” which are from Renew.)

• Hymn 494 - Crown him with many crowns (Diademata)
• Hymn R128 - Blest be the God of Israel (Forest Green)
• Hymn R238 - We will glorify the King of kings (We Will Glorify)
• Hymn 707 - Take my life, and let it be consecrated (Hollingside)
• Hymn R227 - Jesus, remember me (Taizé)
• Hymn 544 - Jesus shall reign where’er the sun (Duke Street)

This week it's Christ the King Sunday! And while you would think that the music would be all about Jesus seated on the throne, or Jesus in the clouds, or even Jesus riding triumphantly into Jerusalem, the vocal music has Jesus on the cross. What gives?

You can blame (?) it on the Lectionary; it chooses the passage from Luke, chapter 23, as the Gospel, where Christ is crucified, and the soldiers mock him, saying, "If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!" There was also an inscription over him, "This is the King of the Jews." One of the thieves also being crucified asks Jesus to remember him, and Jesus tells him that they will be together in paradise. It certainly is a different way to begin one's reign.

So the choir's anthem is a setting in Latin of the verse from the second chapter of Philippians.

Christ was made for us obedient to death—
even death on a cross.
Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place,
and gave Him the name above all names.

It is by the Italian composer Felice Anerio, a composer who came from a family of musicians. His father, Maurizio, was a trombonist at the Oratory of Santa Maria in Vallicella (Rome), and his younger brother, Giovanni Francesco, was a choirmaster and composer. The two brothers sang in the Papal Chapel choir under Giovanni de Pierlugi Palestrina, and when Palestrina died in 1594, Felice was appointed as composer to the Papal Chapel, the only other person to have been so named.

Christus factus est is notable for the striking dissonance of its opening, and for its effective use of suspensions as the main expressive device. This motet, for which Anerio is now most widely known, was not published in his lifetime along with his other sacred works.

The Gospel lesson is also the reason that we are hearing "The Crucifixion" from Samuel Barber's Hermit Songs. (well, that, and the reality that our soprano section leader, Jade Panares, (who is a sophomore voice major at the Moores School of Music at UH) learned it this semester!)

Samuel Barber

Barber was the American composer of whom music critic Donal Henahan said, "Probably no other American composer has ever enjoyed such early, such persistent and such long-lasting acclaim." He wrote a song cycle called Hermit Songs on a grant from the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation, using 10 anonymous Irish monastic poems. Soprano Leontyne Price, with the composer at the piano, premiered the cycle on October 30, 1953, at the Library of Congress. They have become a staple of the soprano repertoire ever since.

Here is the text of "The Crucifixion."

At the cry of the first bird
They began to crucify Thee, O Swan!
Never shall lament cease because of that.
It was like the parting of day from night.
Ah, sore was the suffering borne
By the body of Mary's Son,
But sorer still to Him was the grief
Which for His sake
Came upon His Mother.