Palm Sunday Concert
Sunday, April 10, 2022
7:30 PM
Cathedral of St. Patrick, Norwich
With Jūrate Švedaitė, soprano
Stephan Tieszen, violin
The Concert is FREE,
Please Reserve Your Ticket
Thank you to our concert sponsor: The Edward and Mary Lord Foundation.
Goodwill donations collected at the event will benefit the ECSO and the St. Vincent de Paul Place in Norwich, CT.
COVID Policy: Masks are recommended. There are no vaccination and testing requirements to attend the concert. However, please note that for our musicians and the audience's safety, we will require audience members to be masked in the first 4 rows of seating.
About this event
Join us for this free, open to public concert at the Cathedral of St. Patrick. Featuring Soprano Jurate Švedaitė and violinist Stephan Tieszen.
Concert Program:
The performance will open with Adagio for Organ and Strings, a sublime piece by 18th-century Venetian master Tomaso Albinoni, as reconstructed by musicologist Remo Giazotto. Three of the remaining nine pieces on the program were written by Johann Sebastian Bach: Air from Suite No. 3, familiar to many as “Air on the G String”; the Adagio movement from Bach’s Violin Concerto in E Major, featuring ECSO concertmaster Stephan Tieszen; and the aria “Blute nur, du liebes Herz (Bleed now, loving heart)” from the monumental St. Matthew Passion, sung by soprano Jūratė Švedaitė.
Švedaitė, a graduate of the Lithuanian Academy of Music who teaches at Connecticut College, will also sing Desdemona’s moving “Ave Maria” aria from Giuseppe Verdi’s 1887 opera Otello, based on Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Othello. Tieszen, too, will make a second appearance as the soloist in an opera excerpt, playing the heartrending “Méditation” from Jules Massenet’s Thaïs of 1894. The third opera excerpt on the program is the “Intermezzo” from Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana of 1890. From the famous setting of the hymn to Mary known as Stabat Mater by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, who died in 1736 aged 26, the ECSO will perform the contrasting sections “Vidit suum” and “Cujus animam.”
Closing out the program will be two late 19th-century pieces: the stately Chanson de Nuit, written by Pomp and Circumstance composer Edward Elgar; and “Preghiera (Prayer),” the gently flowing third movement of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s tribute to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Mozartiana.
Goodwill donations collected at the event will benefit the ECSO and St. Vincent de Paul Place in Norwich, CT.