Arise, My Love: Renaissance Polyphony Inspired by the Song of Songs
Organized by the AMS Midwest Chapter.
Fior Angelico, an early music chorus based in Columbus, Ohio, celebrating its 20th year, will present a concert of sacred Renaissance polyphony inspired by the Old Testament book The Song of Solomon, also known as the Song of Songs. With its collection of sensuous, even erotic, poetry on human love and courtship, the Song of Songs is a biblical outlier, lacking any overt religious content. The text instead has traditionally been interpreted as symbolic allegory of the love between God and the faithful as husband and wife. The resulting tension between sacred and secular captured the artistic imagination of numerous composers in the late Renaissance, who experimented with various liturgical and non-liturgical settings of these evocative texts. This concert program will explore some of these varied approaches.
The first portion of the program will focus on direct settings of texts from the Song of Songs by composers Raffaella Aleotti, Francisco Guerrero, Orlande de Lassus, and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. The remainder of the program will explore works more loosely based on these texts, including movements from Lassus’s transcendent Missa Osculetur me, based on his own motet for double chorus. The program will conclude with two works for the Feast of the Assumption by Palestrina and Victoria, the texts of which are replete with imagery inspired by the Song of Songs, now transferred to the Virgin Mary as the Queen of Heaven.
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