The fourth and penultimate concert featuring the entire series of Mozart Masses. Conducted by David Brophy and featuring the Fishamble Sinfonia and four young soloists auditioned from Ireland's leading third level colleges of music: Maria McGrann, soprano, Brid Ni Ghruagain, alto, Andrew Gavin, tenor and Cormac Lawlor, bass.
The choir will perform the magnificent Coronation Mass, completed on March 23, 1779 in Salzburg. Mozart had just returned to the city after 18 months of fruitless job hunting in Paris and Mannheim, and his father promptly got him a job as court organist and composer at Salzburg Cathedral. The mass was almost certainly premiered there on Easter Sunday April 4, 1779.
The KV 317 mass appears to have acquired the nickname "Coronation" at the royal court in Vienna in the early nineteenth century, after becoming the preferred music for royal and imperial coronations as well as services of Thanksgiving. Whether it was performed at the coronations of Leopold II in 1790 and Francis II in 1792, as some sources assume, is unlikely.
We will also perform two other masses, the Missa Longa in C Major, KV 262, composed in 1776, three years before the Coronation Mass and the Missa Solemnis in C Major, KV 337, which was Mozart's last complete mass, composed in 1780.
Tickets will be available for sale at the door: €15 for students and €20 for everyone else.
