Music last heard in the early 1700s at the Royal Court of Saxony will ring out through the Brookline High School Atrium on March 30 at 7:30PM. Students in the BHS Camerata Choir and Chamber Orchestra under Choral Director Michael Driscoll will perform Tomaso Ingegnieri’s long-forgotten Dixit Dominus, a setting of Psalm 109. Driscoll himself rescued this work from undeserved obscurity.
The nearly 300-year-old score, he explains, was written in 1719 in Bologna by P. Tomaso Ingegnieri, a largely unknown Franciscan composer. It was edited and altered by Jan Dismas Zelenka, a Bohemian composer in the Catholic Court of Augustus the Strong and then transferred in 1745 with Zelenka’s entire musical estate to the Dresden Catholic Church, and finally housed at the Saxon State Library, where it remarkably escaped destruction during the 1945 bombing of Dresden. While a few of Zelenka’s own works have entered the repertoire, this and others the composer adapted from his colleagues awaited rediscovery.
“Zelenka’s music is really outstanding and deserves wider recognition and performance” says Driscoll. “Bach himself is said to have admired it.”
Driscoll reached out to the library in Dresden, which allowed him to purchase a CD with high-resolution scans of the fragile, yellowing pages of Zelenka’s handwritten score. From these images, Driscoll painstakingly made the modern edition of the score that BHS students will perform. The piece is written for strings, organ, oboes, and bassoon, with soprano, alto, tenor, and bass voices.
“It’s a really nice work with a good variety of styles in it for the chorus, and many opportunities for solos.” Driscoll says. “The vocal and instrumental writing is perfect for an advanced high school ensemble like ours. For this concert, we’re pairing this work with Vivaldi’s Magnificat, which was likely written with high school-aged singers and players in mind. And it just so happens that the Magnificat was in Zelenka’s personal library, so there’s a nice connection!”
