What: Victoria Baroque Players: Exultant Spring, conducted by Timothy Vernon
When/where: Saturday, 7:30 p.m., Church of St. John the Divine (1611 Quadra St.)
Tickets: $28, seniors $25, students and children $5. In person at Ivy’s Bookshop, Munro’s Books and Long & McQuade
What: Atlanta Boy Choir and Alumni Men’s Choir
When/where: Friday, 7:30 p.m., Christ Church Cathedral
Tickets: By donation, suggested minimum $10
On Saturday, the Victoria Baroque Players will pay homage to spring, and bring their fifth season to a close, with an unusually grand program comprising three major vocal-instrumental works from the mid-18th century.
The ensemble will be enlarged for the occasion, to 16 instruments: two flutes, oboe, two horns, bassoon, strings and chamber organ. It will be joined by six vocal soloists and by its regular partner in choral repertoire, the St. John’s Chamber Singers, a resident choir at the downtown church that is the VBP’s principal venue.
The concert will be conducted by Timothy Vernon, artistic director of Pacific Opera Victoria, who led the Players the last time they offered some especially ambitious programming — Bach’s St. John Passion, in 2013. The program will open with Telemann’s Die Tageszeiten (The Times of Day), an oratorio-like cycle of four secular cantatas that he composed in 1757, at the age of 76.
Unsurprisingly, The Times of Day opens with a sinfonia that depicts dawn, then continues with cantatas titled Morning, Noon, Evening and Night, each comprising three solo-vocal numbers (aria-recitative-aria) and a closing chorus. Telemann cleverly underscores the gradual turning of day into night by progressively lowering the register of the soloist through the four cantatas — soprano, alto, tenor, baritone. He gives each cantata a distinctive orchestral sonority, too.
The evening will close with Michel Corrette’s motet Laudate Dominum de coelis (1765), a choral setting of Psalm 148 based on Spring from The Four Seasons, Vivaldi’s cycle of programmatic violin concertos. That’s not so crazy: Psalm 148 is a hymn of praise whose plentiful nature imagery does put one in mind of spring.
Corrette augmented Vivaldi’s solo and orchestral string parts with three vocal soloists, a five-part choir, and woodwinds and horns; he added his own introductory movement. The result, twice as long as Vivaldi’s original, is a curious but effective mash-up of instrumental and vocal, secular and sacred, Italian and French. The Telemann and the Corrette are both masterly and substantial works, though apparently neither has been performed here.
Between the two will be Mozart’s popular Exsultate, jubilate, K. 165, a virtuosic motet for soprano and orchestra that he composed in Milan, on his third and last trip to Italy, which marked the end of his days as an itinerant child prodigy. It was performed there on Jan. 17, 1773, 10 days before his 17th birthday. Mozart wrote the work, effectively a vocal concerto, for a castrato (male soprano) whom he admired, though on Saturday it will of course be performed by a woman: Monica Orso.
On Friday, Christ Church Cathedral will play host to the 50 combined voices of the Atlanta Boy Choir and its Alumni Men’s Choir, conducted by their founding director, Fletcher Wolfe. Proceeds from the concert will go to the Red Cross’s Fort McMurray disaster-relief fund.
The Atlanta Boy Choir, incorporated in 1959, has performed in many of the world’s most important concert halls, cathedrals and music festivals, in addition to its own concerts and its appearances with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
The choir frequently serves as an ambassador for Georgia and the United States, and has sung many times for heads of state, popes and other dignitaries. Its performance at former president Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in 1977 was only one of many visits to the White House.
The choir has sung in Christ Church Cathedral once before, in the 1990s. Friday’s performance is part of a tour that includes stops in Nanaimo and Vancouver.
The program offers short works from composers including Handel, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Fauré and Rutter, and closes with a group that includes spirituals as well as the pop song We Are the World.