Chorale San Miguel Easter Concert

Chorale San Miguel Easter Concert

Select the event of your choice to buy the tickets.
All prices are in Mexican pesos.

Easter Concert:  Sat.,  Apr. 11,  2 pm

Easter Concert:  Sat.,  Apr. 11,  4:30 pm

Capilla de Tercera Orden
(Corner of San Francisco and Juarez)

Following its two sold-out concerts late last year, Mozart’s Requiem and Handel’s Messiah, Chorale San Miguel is presenting an Easter Concert, featuring J.S. Bach’s cantata Christ lag in Todesbanden (“Christ lay in the snares of death”), a “fiery, dramatic” work (says Bach specialist John Eliot Gardner), along with Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in D minor, and choral music by Giovanni Palestrina, Henryk Górecki and Ola Gjeilo. Full chorus, orchestra, and vocal soloists.

Johann Sebastian Bach left behind well over a thousand compositions, and around one-fifth of his output consisted of cantatas — choral works on religious and secular themes, usually requiring vocal soloists, a four-part choir (soprano, alto, tenor, bass), and orchestra. Bach’s cantatas are some of the greatest choral works ever composed, and many have enough stirring narrative drive to resemble miniature operas. Bach’s 1707 Easter cantata Christ lag in Todesbanden (“Christ lay in the snares of death”) is a prime example. Bach specialist John Eliot Gardner calls it a “fiery, dramatic” work, and “a bold, innovative piece of musical drama.”

The cantata is a centerpiece of Chorale San Miguel‘s Easter Concert, being held twice (2:00 pm and 4:30 pm) on Saturday, April 11, in the Capilla de Tercera Orden, the magnificent chapel adjoining the San Francisco Church. Malcolm Halliday, the conductor and music director, has programmed another work of J.S. Bach, the Harpischord Concerto in D minor, for which Halliday will be keyboard soloist.

Other compositions on the program are Sicut Cervus by Giovanni Palestrina, and two exceptional contemporary works for chorus and orchestra, Totus Tuus, by Henryk Górecki, and Norwegian-American composer Ola Gjeilo‘s Luminous Night of the Soul.

Ticket buyers are advised that the less-expensive choir loft seats feature magnificent acoustics, but require a climb up a steep staircase. Because demand for tickets exceeded availability for Chorale San Miguel’s presentations of Mozart’s Requiem and Handel’s Messiah, additional seats for the Easter Concert, for 300 pesos in a side section of the chapel, will be sold only at the door.