Collegium Cincinnati presents
SummerSing 2018

Passion. Heat. Music.

Voices come alive during the most exciting music-making week of the summer! Collegium Cincinnati invites singers of all ages and abilities to join in putting together masterworks of choral repertoire.
What: A one-week choral festival for young and old.

Who: The musicians of Collegium Cincinnati, a surprise cast of guest soloists, and YOU!
When: July 19-28, 2018
Where: Christ Church Cathedral | 318 East Fourth Street Cincinnati, OH 45202
How: www.CollegiumCincinnati.org/summersing2018

2018 Repertoire:
Gabriel Fauré – REQUIEM
Morten Lauridsen – LUX AETERNA
Chamber Choir repertoire to be announced.

Collegium Cincinnati is pleased to invite you to join us for SummerSing – Cincinnati’s hottest participatory choral festival. Cincinnati has a long and rich history of choral singing; at SummerSing, singers from all over the country unite for a week of rehearsals and social fun that culminates in electric performances of great choral repertoire.

In addition to making great music together, we make new friends! Food and drink after rehearsals and concerts are as important … well almost … as the singing.
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Singers have the opportunity to perform with the instrumentalists of Collegium Cincinnati and will be offered the opportunity to take private voice lessons, improve their singer’s diction, and, most importantly, have fun!

THE MASTERWORKS CHOIR
Under the direction of the Collegium’s artistic director Christopher Eanes, the MasterWorks Choir will tackle the unmatched REQUIEM by Gabriel Fauré and the new classic LUX AETERNA by Morten Lauridsen. This program of light and transcendence is every choral singer’s dream!
Dates: July 22-28
 
THE CHAMBER CHOIR (Inaugural Season)
This year, for the first time, we will also be offering a Chamber Choir experience. Under the direction of guest conductor Christopher Shepard, this auditioned experience will offer 16-24 advanced singers the opportunity to prepare a program of finely crafted a cappella and accompanied works in an intimate setting.

Christopher Shepard is the conductor of CONCORA: Connecticut’s professional chorus, the Worcester Chorus, and the Masterwork Chorus of New Jersey. Most recently, he conducted a sold-out performance of Handel’s MESSIAH at Carnegie Hall. Chris is an engaging conductor with a distinguished career director both professional and avocational ensembles.
Dates: July 19-22

Fourteen of Cincinnati's finest singers will take the stage on Sunday for Collegium Cincinnati's performance of Handel's MESSIAH. Get to know these wonderful voices before the concert!

           Lovers of Baroque music often fall into the “Bach camp” or the “Handel camp”, though it is certainly possible to love both equally—something not quite so easy with other more oppositional composers like Wagner and Brahms.  After all, Bach and Handel did share the instantly recognizable musical language of the high Baroque.  In fact, part of what is so attractive about the music of both Handel and Bach is that they both effortlessly blended the sunny Italian sense of melody and harmonic clarity with the more sober counterpoint of the German school, seasoned with a soupçon of French rococo ornamentation. 
            Although their music is generally very similar, I like to think that what differentiates them is related to the ways in which their lives diverged from one another.  In a consequence of almost mythical significance, these two giants of western music were born within one month of one another in 1685—Handel on February 23rd and Bach on March 21st, in towns about 80 miles apart.  They both served as church musicians and worked in royal courts; but whereas Handel travelled extensively, coming of “musical age” in Italy in his early 20’s, Bach remained in his native central-eastern region of Germany his entire life. He was by no means cut off from musical life, however: many musicians made the pilgrimage to Leipzig to meet Bach, and he was deeply influenced by Italian composers, most notably Vivaldi.  Both Handel and Bach were friends with Georg Philipp Telemann, who is less well-known today, but was one of the most prolific composers of the Baroque.  (In fact, Telemann had been the first choice for the job eventually awarded to Bach in Leipzig.)
            One of the quickest ways to differentiate Bach and Handel is to describe Bach as church composer and Handel as an opera composer.  On the face of it, this tidy construction is largely correct: Bach spent the last 27 years of his life as Music Director of Leipzig’s churches, and Handel was for many years a successful operatic composer and producer, and he only turned to oratorio to recover his massive financial losses from producing operas.
            But the full story is more complex.  In addition to his famous English-language oratorios dealing with biblical texts, Handel wrote a great deal of church music.  There are the many works written in English during his service to the English crown, such as the Coronotaion Anthems, as well as the Chandos Anthems, written for the Duke of Chandos.  But he also wrote a number of German cantatas (the genre with which Bach’s name would be forever linked), as well as Latin settings from his years in Rome, most notably the extraordinary, Italianate Dixit Dominus.  Bach and Handel are musically linked by a German passion libretto by Barthold Brockes.  Handel used the libretto for his Brockes-Passion; Bach would draw from the same text for his own St John Passion.
            It is certainly true that Bach did not write any operas, a point about which many musicologists have speculated over the years.  The reason for this is probably due to the circumstances in which Bach found himself—none of the courts in which he worked produced operas, and by the time he arrived in Leipzig, the local opera company had folded.  Nearby Dresden had an important opera company, and it is reasonable to think that Bach might have written for them had he so intended.  He did write some quasi-operatic dramatic secular cantatas, but this is the closest he came to explicit operas.  In an odd twist, however, Bach was criticized by church authorities in Leipzig for bringing opera-like characteristics to his cantatas, with their high sense of emotion and drama.  Certainly, lovers of Bach’s choral music believe that his two Passion settings give us a glimpse into the kind of genius that he would have brought to opera composition.
            The oddest coincidence linking Bach and Handel, who never met (despite two attempts by Bach to meet Handel) is also the most tragic.  Both composers developed cataracts in late middle age, leading them both to turn to the English eye surgeon, John Taylor.  A shameless self-promoter and almost certainly a charlatan, Taylor was the eye surgeon to King George II, and he also travelled through Europe performing surgery.  On a tour through Leipzig in 1749, he operated on Bach, without success.  Many people believe that the strenuous operation, which weakened the composer, led to his death in 1750.  Handel also submitted to Taylor’s knife, to no avail: after his 1751, he spent the final years of his life in near-complete blindness.
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Chris Shepard
© 2011

We're pleased to announce the following twelve outstanding vocalists that will be performing as a part of this weekend's Leipzig's Got Talent concert; click on each of their pictures to read more, and don't forget to get your tickets now!

​Here are some tips and tricks for preparing for Sunday's performance of the Saint John Passion

With just nine outstanding singers and an world-class orchestra, you’ll hear Bach’s first passion the way he intended it.

The story of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus is told through the incredibly powerful music of the world’s greatest composer – J.S. Bach. Bach’s St. John Passion is exciting, frightening, and heart-wrenching.

Here are some ways you can get ready:

Download a copy of the full orchestra score. (We don't mind if you want to follow it on your iPad during the performance, by the way.)

Download Part I
Download Part II

Listen to a full version of the performance now! This link will take you to the late Nikolaus Harnoncourt's seminal recording of the Saint John Passion. Maestro Harnoncourt was a pioneer in the early-music movement and passed away this month.

Will you be singing the chorales during the performance? Here are some things to consider.

You are invited to sing along on the chorales (printed below), as many believe the congregation would have in Bach’s time. The tunes would have been familiar to his eighteenth-century audience, as many of them will be to you today. We kindly ask the following:
 

• There will be an optional rehearsal of the chorales in the Christ Church Chapel at noon the day of the performance.
• You may sit and sing from anywhere in the congregation, but…
• …there will be a few pews in the front if you would like to sit with other singers.
• Sing loud and proud! Don’t be afraid of mistakes.
• We have provided the melody to each chorale below – in English. If you’d like to sing in four-part harmony, we will be singing from the Bärenreiter edition.
• Please sing seated so we can keep the flow of the piece going.
• The pacing of the St John moves quickly, so be ready to go!

Finally, don't forget to come at 12:30 for the organ prelude!

Bach: St. John Passion
Sunday, March 20, 2016
1:00 pm (organ prelude begins at 12:30 pm)

Christ Church Cathedral
318 East Fourth Street
Cincinnati, OH 45202
On Singing the Chorales