Saturday May 30th, 6pm at Meiji Gakuin University Chapel (Shirokane) Saturday June 6th, 6pm at Rikkyo University Chapel (Ikebukuro) http://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/campus/shirokane/index_en.html http://english.rikkyo.ac.jp/access/pmap/ikebukuro.html 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of the death of Franz Joseph Haydn and the birth of Felix Mendelssohn. Come join the British Embassy Choir Tokyo in a musical celebration of these two great masters of the choral art. From the works of Mendelssohn we have chosen three of the composer's most striking works for unaccompanied chorus and two compositions for chorus and orchestra. Among these is the famous "Hear my prayer" written in 1844 for a choir in London, and his magnificent setting of Psalm 42 written in 1838 and which Mendelssohn considered to be finest choral work of his career. The major work on the concert is Haydn's Mass in Bb, commonly known as the Theresienmesse. Composed in 1799, this work is the fourth of his last six masses and written to celebrate the name day of the wife of his patron, Nikolaus Esterhazy II. This mass shows "Papa" Haydn at the height of his musical powers and is a superb testimony to his reputation as one of the greatest choral composers of all time.
