Saturday, June 21st, 2025
Spem In Alium
Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, United Kingdom
Details
'''The Sheldonian Theatre, located in Oxford, England, was built from 1664 to 1669 after a design by Christopher Wren for the University of Oxford. The building is named after Gilbert Sheldon, chancellor of the University at the time and the project's main financial backer. It is used for music concerts, lectures and University ceremonies, but not for drama until 2015 when the Christ Church Dramatic Society staged a production of The Crucible.HistoryWhat came to be known as the Sheldonian Theatre was Wren's second work and was commissioned by Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury. With the triumph of the Restoration and with it the Church of England, Dean Fell, Vice-Chancellor of the University, sought to revive a project proposed in the 1630s by the late William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury: a separate building whose sole use would be graduation and degree ceremonies.In the past these increasingly rowdy occasions had taken place in the university's church of St. Mary-the-Virgin-on-High. "The notion that 'sacrifice is made equally to God and Apollo', in the same place where homage was due to God and God alone, was as repugnant to Fell and his colleagues as it had been to Laud"; with this in mind they approached the Archbishop of Canterbury Gilbert Sheldon, for his blessing, his assistance, and a donation. Enjoy the unique sound of a large choir singing unaccompanied, as the Oxford Bach Choir for its summer concert takes you on a journey through five centuries of music. We will begin and end our concert with Thomas Tallis’s astonishing motet for 40 voices, Spem in Alium, During the evening, we will travel by way of J. S. Bach’s classic masterpiece Lobet den Herrn, via the rich romanticism of motets by Anton Bruckner and Charles Stanford to the fascinating sonorities of three modern heirs to the great choral tradition, Cecilia McDowall, Caroline Shaw, and John Tavener, including the latter’s much loved Song for Athene. Such music is not often performed by choirs as large as the OBC, and the greater number of singers promises to give it an added intensity.