On Sunday, April 2, at 4:00PM in Alden Hall, the combined choirs of WPI, Regis College (90 women), Wells College, Union College, and Eastern Nazarene College, plus an orchestra of forty five (45) players from the Boston union and students from WPI and Clark will present the Coronation Mass and the Verdi Te Deum. The chorus is one of the largest to be assembled at WPI, numbering over 200 singers. For the first time we are using soloists from within the various colleges - by audition - for voice and musicality. The judges were very pleased with the audition response from the choirs and the level of performance of the players from the orchestra.
Mozart was inspired to write this Mass when he saw a painting of the Coronation of the Virgin Mary in Salzburg. The instrumentation is the usual one would expect from the classic period, but it contains no viola parts. However, the vitality of the violin parts makes up for the lack of an inner voice.
The Verdi makes up for it! Scored for large orchestra and double chorus, the dynamic range extends from triple piano to quadruple forte-true Verdi! The Te Deum is the longest, most dramatic, and most varied of the Four Sacred Pieces. Its musical language, again with economy and little repetition, scales the heights and descends to the depths in sensitive response to the text. In a letter to the director of the Chapel of St. Anthony of Padua, the composer noted that most Te Deum's are triumphal settings, appropriate to victories, coronations, and the like. He promised that his version would portray all the facets of the text: "At the beginning Heaven and Earth rejoice...But halfway through, the color and tone changes... and Christ is born of the Virgin and appears to mankind...Mankind believes, in the Judex venturus...invokes him-Salvum fac...and ends with a prayer...Dignare Domine die isto, pitiful gloom, distress approaching even terror!" Verdi ends with a humble prayer. A single lonely soprano voice chants the words: "In you, Lord, I have trusted," which are repeated in glory by the chorus and rounded off in hushed solemnity by the orchestra.
Romantic music at its best - storms, sighs, multitudes, thunder, sweeping melodies, and all in Alden Hall. Who would have thought????