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8:00 PM THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2018
PAVILION
LOS ANGELES MASTER CHORALE
GRANT GERSHON,
artistic director and conductor
PETER SELLARS,
director
†
JAMES F. INGALLS,
lighting designer
DANIELLE DOMINIGUE SUMI,
costume designer
PAMELA SALLING,
stage manager
ORLANDO DI LASSO
Lagrime di San Pietro
*
(
The Tears of Saint Peter
)
1. Il magnanimo Pietro (When the generous Peter)
2. Ma gli archi ( e bows, however)
3. Tre volte haveva ( ree times already)
4. Qual a l’incontro (No one should boast)
5. Giovane donna (Never did a young lady)
6. Così tal hor (As it happens)
7. Ogni occhio del Signor ( e eyes of the Lord)
8. Nessun fedel trovai (I found none faithful)
9. Chi ad una ad una (He who could retell one by one)
10. Come falda di neve (Like a snowbank)
11. E non fu il pianto suo (And his crying)
12. Quel volto ( at face)
13. Veduto il miser (Realizing that he felt)
14. E vago d’incontrar (And wishing to nd someone)
15. Vattene vita va (Go, life, go away)
16. O vita troppo rea (O life, too guilty)
17. Ah quanti già felici (To how many)
18. Non trovava mia fé (My faith would have not failed)
19. Queste opre e più ( ese events)
20. Negando il mio Signor (By denying my Lord)
21. Vide homo (See, O man)
.
†
Ravinia debut
*
First performance at Ravinia
Supertitles by David Rakita
Ravinia expresses its appreciation for the generous support of
Sponsor
Welz Kau man and Jon Teeuwissen
.
e Los Angeles Master Chorale production of
Lagrime di San Pietro
is made possible with generous
underwriting from the Lovelace Family Trust and is dedicated to the memory of Jon Lovelace in honor
of the special friendship he shared with director Peter Sellars. e touring production is supported by
Kiki and David Gindler, Philip A. Swan, Laney and Tom Techentin, Jerrie and Abbott Brown,
Cindy and Gary Frischling, Marian H. and John Niles, Frederick J. Ruopp, and Eva and Marc Stern.
A SAINT’S REMORSE
Lasso’s High-Renaissance Masterpiece
What’s the correct way to refer to one of the
most extraordinary musical minds in history:
Orlande/Orlando/Roland de Lassus/di Lasso?
ere’s a Franco-Flemish form and an Ital-
ianized one; sometimes the two get mixed to-
gether.
ere’s even a Latin option intended to
standardize the situation.
e very profusion
of variants points to the internationalism and
cross-pollination across borders that marked
the era of the High Renaissance in Europe.
is was a time in which a young musician born
in the Netherlandish part of the Habsburg Em-
pire (in what is nowadays Belgium) could nd
himself posted to positions at major courts and
churches in Italy while still in his early s, trav-
el back north for a brief spell (possibly in France
and even England), and then be lured, at around
age , to join the ambitious court of an aris-
tocrat in Munich (the Duke of Bavaria), where
he happily settled for almost four decades until
his death in
—while still undertaking trips
to Vienna and Italy and picking up on the latest
developments in musical style.
Such, in brief outline, is the life story of Orlando
di Lasso. (Let’s simplify and stick to the Italian
spelling, the one used on the title page of many of
his published works, including the rst edition of
Lagrime di San Pietro
.) During his long, produc-
tive years in Munich, he became an international
celebrity. Lasso was born at just the right time
to bene t from the new technology of printing,
which disseminated his proli c output at an as-
tonishing rate (about two publications of his mu-
sic a year). Hopeful young composers traveled far
and wide to learn from him—the Gabrielis from
Venice may have been among them—and Lasso
was honored by emperor and pope alike.
“What you have is the iTunes of the High Re-
naissance: Everyone is hearing each other’s re-
leases, in di erent languages, some in pirate ver-
sions, and mixing them together,” says director
Peter Sellars. “All these versions of Orlando’s
name evolved because he was active in di erent
music centers. It feels like today, when there isn’t
a single way music has to happen, and everyone
is listening to everyone else.”
Lasso was particularly revered for the variety and
extent of his output across vocal genres (curiously,
instrumental music is missing fromhis vast extant
oeuvre) as well as for the depth of his knowledge
of the grand tradition of Renaissance polyphony
that was just about to reach its end. In the centu-
ry that dawned a few years a er Lasso’s death, the
new genre of opera would ourish, and its cham-
pion Claudio Monteverdi would pioneer a dra-
matically di erent musical language—a language
from which modern Western music emerged.
Another contemporary artist, the French poet
Pierre de Ronsard, raved: “ emore-than-divine
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