Friday, April 12, 2013

Lucca music

After our huge day in Firenze yesterday it was a tough call to drag ourselves out later that night for a performance of sacred music at the Cattedrale di San Martino.

Lucca is a very musical town - birthplace of Puccini rah rah - and there are musical performances on every night in all the cathedrals. You can hear the Puccini and Verdi arias in the early evening Lucca air you breathe.  However sacred music is much more to my taste than opera so I thought this concert by the orchestra and choir of the School of the Archdiocese of Prague (I think that is what Il Liceo Arcivescovile di Praga means) would be a good one.



As it turned out we found the performance wonderful - enough to make your spine tingle.  The orchestra and choir (including two amazingly good soprano solos) only played for just over an hour...all my sacred music favourites...including Vivaldi's Gloria, some Bach, Mozart and of course, the Hallelujah chorus from Handel's Messiah to end things off nicely - all the YouTube favourites to be sure.

The acoustics in the cathedral were stupendously good - giving every note played and sung a beautifully mellow, layered sound....and what about that setting!


Maybe it was the exhaustion but I felt for a moment I could be tempted to become religious if it included wonderfully spell binding treats like this on a regular basis.


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