Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass

OLD CHURCH SLAVONIC — STILL PLAYING: Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass (Caroline Rodgers, scena.org).
On March 29, Yannick Nézet-Séguin will conduct the Glagolitic Mass by Leoš Janáček for the first time with the Orchestre Métropolitain. Very rarely played in Montréal, this impressive work will be part of the conductor’s Slavic Masterpieces concert. For the occasion, he stopped by La Scena Musicale for an interview.

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The Glagolitic Mass was composed in 1926 and had its premiere on December 5, 1927 in Brno, the second city of the Czech Republic. The conductor was Jaroslav Kvapil. The text is in Old Church Slavonic, the ancestor of modern Bulgarian and Macedonian. It is written using the Glagolitic alphabet, the oldest of the Slavic alphabets, dating from the ninth century.

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For past posts on Old Church Slavonic, especially in relation to the Old Testament pseudepigrapha, see here and many links