Following the past three seasons’ sold-out concerts in nearby Rhinebeck, the Bard Music Festival returns off-campus for Program Six, “I live with God ever before me: Mozart’s Religion.” Featuring James Bagwell, the Bard Festival Chorale, and the renovated organ of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah, this program presents a sampling of Mozart’s own sacred music, dating from God is Our Refuge, a motet composed at just nine years old, to a late work commissioned for the musical clock at a wax museum, by way of two Church Sonatas and the dramatic liturgical psalm settings of his Vesperae solennes de Confessore. These will be heard alongside the original, less familiar version of Gregorio Allegri’s haunting Miserere, a work strictly guarded by the Vatican until Mozart transcribed it from memory as a child; J. S. Bach’s funeral motet Fürchte dich nicht; the fourth Chandos Anthem by George Frideric Handel, whom Mozart held in particularly high esteem; an Epiphany anthem by his student Thomas Attwood, the organist of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral; and the Missa brevis in F, a major liturgical choral work by Joseph Haydn, with whom Mozart shared a close friendship and deep-seated mutual reverence.

Program

7 pm • Performance: Bard Festival Ensemble and Chorale, conducted by James Bagwell, choral director

Wolfgang Amadé Mozart  (1756–91)
God is Our Refuge, K20 (1765)
Church Sonata No. 6 in B-flat, K212 (1775)
Church Sonata in D, K245 (1776)
Vesperae solennes de Confessore, K339 (1780)
Adagio and Allegro in F Minor for Mechanical Organ, K594 (1790)

Gregorio Allegri (c. 1582–1652)
Miserere mei, Deus (1661)

George Frideric Handel (1685–1759)
Chandos Anthem No. 4, “O sing unto the Lord,” HWV 249b (1718)

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)
Fürchte dich nicht, BWV 228 (1726)

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)
Missa brevis in F, Hob. XXIII:1 (1749)

Thomas Attwood (1765–1838)
O God, Who by the Leading of a Star (1814)