We are extending a 50% discount promo offer to our ba-acappella friends. There
is no limit to the number of tickets you can buy using the promo code.

This is an online ticket purchase offer only for our Saturday evening concert at
8pm, at St. Paul's Episcopal in Oakland. The promo to use is: Davitt at
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/455709038.


Chalice Consort will open its 2009 season with music by William Byrd
(c.1540-1623) in November; directed by our guest director, Davitt Moroney.


“By the Waters of Babylon” is a provocative
program of choral pieces by the greatest English composer of the late
Renaissance, William Byrd (c.1540-1623). Although Byrd continued
writing for the Protestant Anglican Church as part of his official
court functions as a Gentleman of Queen Elizabeth I's Chapel Royal, he
remained a Roman Catholic in private, at a time when this personal
choice was becoming increasingly dangerous.

These works illustrate with beautiful and highly passionate music many
of the historical issues that were being played out at that
time, including religious fanaticism, oppression of minority communities,
questions of faith and conscience, and political issues church and
state, many of which are being replayed in different ways and from
quite different perspectives around the world today, in America, in
France and Britain, in Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan,
etc. The crisis of communication between extremist Catholics and
Protestants in the sixteenth century was just as strong as the present
one between, for example, some extremist Christians and Muslims. Byrd's
music reminds us there was a narrow middle way at a time when
oppressive tyrannical actions were hidden under the mask of state religion,
and private religious beliefs often caused feverish believers to engage
in acts of terrorism, and when caught to be tortured and executed.

The pieces in this concert occupy the middle ground between secular and
sacred, being mostly non liturgical religious texts set to music
primarily for private enjoyment at home. The evening begins with with
the only secular piece in the program, placed as an invocation to the
power of Music. It is taken from the well-known collection of Psalms, Songs and
Sonnets.
We then trace Byrd's public conformity and official acceptance of the
state religion imposed by Queen ELizabeth; and his private music of
political protest, in his motets of lamentation and outrage, which gave
voice to an oppressed community who often saw themselves as martyrs for
their religion. The program ends with serene pieces from Byrd's private
mission of solace in comfort of the berieved and in memory of those who
had died.

At
the very center of the concert is "Why do I take my paper ink and
pen?", a work Byrd published despite its highly dangerous associations;
he here composed music to a poem written by Henry Walpole that recorded
the persecution and execution of Edmund Campion, a Jesuit priest who
was executed in 1581 (supposedly for treason, but in reality for his
religious beliefs), a gesture that started a wave of persecution of
Catholics in England. In a move reminiscent of the modern Taliban, the
Protestant state also ordered the hands of the poem's printer to be
chopped off. But a few years later Byrd bravely published this
extraordinary musical setting. All of the pieces in this concert are
exceptionally powerful, both musically and emotionally. This is a
concert not to miss, of music that cannot be forgotten.
~Davitt Moroney

Tickets: $20 general admission, $15 seniors, $10 students. $2 discount for
advance online purchase

November 6, 2009 - 8 p.m.
Old First Presbyterian Church
1751 Sacramento Street, San Francisco, CA 94109
At the corner of Sacramento St. & Van Ness, San Francisco
Parking: Old First Parking Garage on Sacrament between Polk and Van Ness
Tickets- http://www.oldfirstconcerts.org/performances/268/


November 7, 2009 - 8 p.m.
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Oakland
116 Montecito Ave, Oakland, CA 94610-4598
At the corner of Montecito Ave & Bay Pl., just off Grant Ave, Oakland
Tickets: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/455709038
Directions

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