In Dulci Jubilo!

Each December the San Francisco Bach Choir offers a holiday program to celebrate the spirit of the season with joyous music from our rich heritage of the European Renaissance and Baroque. This year’s concert will focus on the great Venetian polychoral tradition of the late 16th century, featuring works of Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli and their German disciple Hans Leo Hassler.

Venice in the late 16th century was Europe’s most cosmopolitan musical center. It was here that a group of Italian and Flemish composers working at the Basilica of San Marco created a revolutionary new style that would spread across the continent within a generation. Chief among its architects were Andrea Gabrieli and his nephew Giovanni Gabrieli, who experimented with placing contrasting choirs of instruments and singers at various points around the Cathedral. The Gabrielis created a new "polychoral" idiom, in which they wrote works that exuded a splendor never before heard in European music, sometimes scored for a half-dozen separate choirs with over twenty independent voices arrayed around the church. Many of their works mixed voices and brass instruments, drawing upon the rich northern Italian tradition of wind playing.

As the new style spread beyond Italy, it drew young musicians from across Europe to study in Venice. One of the first was the gifted young German composer and organist Hans Leo Hassler, who worked with the Gabrielis in the mid-1580s and went on to write superbly crafted choral works that merged the extroverted Venetian style with the sweetness and lyricism of his native German folk music.

Joining us once again will be The Whole Noyse, America’s premier early brass ensemble, acclaimed especially for its performances of early Italian brass music. These Bach Choir concerts have become a holiday tradition in the Bay Area and sell out early. Don’t miss this season’s special program.