Fuma Sacra to Present Portuguese Christmas Vespers

Fuma Sacra, the resident choral ensemble at Westminster Choir College of Rider University, will perform its annual Christmas concert in Bristol Chapel on Westminster’s campus in Princeton Sunday, December 19 and Monday, December 20 at 8 p.m.  Fuma Sacra will be joined by the Renaissance band Piffaro for these performances.

Entitled “A Portuguese Christmas Vespers,” the concert will reconstruct the lavishness that was Portuguese sacred polyphony in the late Renaissance.  The program will include works that would have been performed in the great cathedrals of Lisbon and Coimbra in the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries. 

Founded in 1989, Fuma Sacra is renowned as one of the country’s most exciting and important interpreters of early music.  Currently ensemble-in-residence at Westminster, it has been acclaimed for passionate and virtuoso performances, which, in the words of Classical New Jersey, “have left the audience gasping in amazement.”

Although the ensemble is committed to historically informed performance, Fuma Sacra’s concerts are even more widely known for their innovative programming, passionate performance and depth of artistry.   Its first recording, The Best Nowells That E’er Befell, includes music from the 10^th to the 20^th centuries in seven languages.

Fuma Sacra’s unusually wide-ranging repertoire includes not only early music, but also music of our own time.  Earlier this season it performed the American premiere of Caldara’s Maddalena ai piedi di Cristo.

Highlights of past seasons include a European debut at the 1991 Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy; performances of Bach cantatas with America’s finest specialists on Baroque instruments; and a concert commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.  It has premiered a number of works, including Arvo Pärt’s Passio and Shema: A Cantata by Andrew Bleckner and Alice Mann.

A member of Westminster’s conducting faculty, conductor Andrew Megill is recognized for his artistry and wide-ranging repertoire that extends from Renaissance music to newly commissioned works.  He has prepared choruses for the American Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, the Spoleto Festival Orchestra, and the Berkshire Opera for conductors including Zdenek Macal, Joseph Flummerfelt, Richard Bradshaw and Spiros Argiris.  In addition to serving as artistic director of Fuma Sacra, he is conductor of Westminster Kantorei, associate conductor of the Westminster Symphonic Choir, chorus master for the Spoleto Festival USA, where he was recently acclaimed for training “the finest opera chorus in the world” (Charleston Post and Courier), and the music director of the Masterwork Chorus and Orchestra.  He has led the Masterwork Chorus, one of New Jersey’s finest volunteer choirs, in major choral-orchestral repertory throughout New Jersey and New York, including at Avery Fisher and Carnegie Halls.

He is also in frequent demand as a guest conductor for groups such as the Choral Arts Society in Washington D.C., Concert Chorale of New York (including work with folk singer Judy Collins); Princeton Opera, the National Christian Fine Arts Council; and the Charleston Singers’ Guild.  He served as associate conductor and chorus master for the Garden State Philharmonic for six years and as conductor of the West Village Chorale in Manhattan.

Piffaro, founded in 1980, performs music of the late Medieval and Renaissance periods on a large and varied collection of early wind instruments, augmented by percussion and strings. Modeled after the official civic, chapel and court bands that were the premier professional ensembles from the 14th into the early 17th centuries, Piffaro has pursued the instruments and music of the peasantry and of rustic life as well, combining both with dramatic effects when appropriate.

Under the direction of Joan Kimball and Robert Wiemken, the Band produces its own concert series in Philadelphia with three to four programs per year, bringing to their series some of the finest talents in early music performance as their guests.  Excerpts from these concerts are regularly broadcast nationwide on National Public Radio’s Performance Today.

Piffaro tours throughout the United States, and has performed on many of the major early music series in the United States, including Music Before 1800 and The Cloisters Concerts in New York City, the Seattle Early Music Guild, the San Francisco Early Music Society, the Concert Society at Maryland, Milwaukee’s Early Music Now, and the Pittsburgh Renaissance & Baroque Society.

The ensemble made its European debut in May of 1993 at Tage Alter Musik Regensburg.  They performed there again in 1996 as part of a tour of summer music festivals in Austria, Germany, France, Belgium and Italy, and in 1997 and 1998 they appeared at festivals in Hamburg, Berlin, The Czech Republic, Belgium, Spain and Colombia, South America. Since then, they have returned to Regensburg for a third time, performed two summers in a row at the Spoleto Festival in Italy, made their English debut at the York Early Music Festival, and performed at the Utrecht Early Music Festival in the summer of 2001.

Piffaro has recorded for Newport Classics and for Deutsche Grammophon, Archiv Produktion. Canzoni e Danze, the ensemble’s first recording for DG’s Archiv division, was released in the fall of 1995, and was followed by a recording of French music in 1996, a recording of Spanish & Portuguese wind music in 1997, and a Flemish recording in March of 2000. Since then, it has signed with Dorian Records, and its first recording with that label, Stadtpfeiffer, Wind Music of Renaissance Germany, was released early in 2001, with its second, a recording of repertoire from Harmonices Musices Odhecaton A, released in February 2002.

Tickets for these performances are $20 for adults and $15 for senior citizens and students.  To order, call the Westminster box office weekdays between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. at 609-921-2663.  Westminster Choir College is located on the corner of Hamilton Avenue and Walnut Lane in Princeton.