The Hanover Band continue their Arundel Festival tradition

The Hanover Band will be performing Pergolesi's Stabat Mater and some of Handel's lesser-known operatic arias in the setting of St Nicholas' Church, Arundel for this year's Arundel Festival.
The Hanover BandThe Hanover Band
The Hanover Band

The concert is on August 25 at 7.30pm. Tickets on 0333 666 33 66. Doors open 6.45pm.

Stephen Neiman, Hanover Band general manager, said: “The Stabat Mater is a 13th-century sequence used regularly for personal and communal devotions from the time of its creation. The text had been used by composers such as Palestrina, Lassus and Haydn, but the outstanding setting of the verses was considered at that time to be the one that Pergolesi made in 1736. It is an unashamedly theatrical work.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“Handel composed 42 operas between 1705 and 1741, including Giulio Cesare from 1724. He began composing operas in Germany before moving to England, where he found great success in this genre. His first opera in England, Rinaldo (1711), was met with enthusiasm, and several more Italian operas soon followed. Although almost all his English language works are technically oratorios rather than operas, several of them, such as Semele (1743), have become an important part of the opera repertoire.”

The full programme is: Antonio Caldara – Sinfonia No.3 in F Minor ‘La morte d’Abel’; Giovanni Battista Pergolesi – Stabat Mater; George Frideric Handel – Concerto Grosso Op.3 No.2 in Bb; George Frideric Handel – Arias from Giulio Cesare: Va tacito e nascosto, Al lampo dell’armi, Che sento? Oh Dio!, Da tempeste il legno infranto, Caro! Bella!

Soloists are Katherine Watson soprano and William Towers countertenor.

Katherine was a choral scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a year after graduating won a place on William Christie’s Le Jardin des Voix. In 2012 she won Glyndebourne’s John Christie award, appearing as Fairy/Nymph in The Fairy Queen (Cummings 2012), then going on to perform the role of the goddess Diana in Hippolyte et Aricie (Christie 2013).

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

William read English at Cambridge University and was a postgraduate scholar at the Royal Academy of Music. He appeared extensively as a soloist in Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach Cantata Pilgrimage and his performances in the complete Bach series have been issued on CD.

His opera engagements have included Medoro (Handel Orlando) and Farnace (Mozart Mitridate Re di Ponto) for the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Oberon (Britten A Midsummer Night’s Dream) for Teatro La Fenice Venice, Teatro Petruzzelli Bari.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad
Related topics: