125 Jaar Mastreechter Staar by Mastreechter Staar / Chantal Janzen

Mastreechter Staar / Chantal Janzen

125 Jaar Mastreechter Staar

Format: CD
Label: Challenge Classics
UPC: 0608917218220
Catnr: CC 72182
Release date: 05 November 2007

1 CD

Label
Challenge Classics

UPC
0608917218220

Catalogue number
CC 72182

Release date
05 November 2007

Album

Artist(s)

Composer(s)

About the album

In 2008 the Royal Choral Society Mastreechter Staar celebrated its 125th anniversary. The choir made a tour with a series of concerts. On this album you will find a nice selection of their repertoire, including opera choirs, russian traditionals, negro spirituals, musical repertoire and popular songs. Cooperating with the choir are the singers Chantal Janzen and Bèr Schellings.

Het beste van de Mastreechter Staar
In 2008 vierde de Koninklijke zangvereniging Mastreechter Staar haar 125-jarig jubileum. Dit album is een verzameling van de hoogtepunten door de jaren heen, onder leiding van Roger Moens. Gastoptredens zijn er voor Chantal Janzen en voor de vaste solist en echte Maastrichtenaar, Bèr Schellings. Het is een gevarieerd repertoire met operakoren, Russische volksliederen, gospel, musical liedjes en populaire muziek.

Het koor kent al sinds 1899 het predicaat Koninklijk, toegekend door Koningin Wilhelmina. Sindsdien heeft het koor meerdere keren voor de Koninklijke familie opgetreden waaronder een optreden ter gelegenheid van de inauguratie van Koningin Beatrix. Sinds het 125-jarig jubileum treed Mastreechter Staar geregeld op met het Strauss-orkest van André Rieu.

Artist(s)

Chantal Janzen

Mastreechter Staar

The Royal Choir Society Mastreechter Staar: one of most famous male choirs in the Netherlands.
The ‘Staar’ was founded in 1883 and in 1899 it was granted the designation ‘Royal’. Since 1903 the choir has had the successive Queens of The Netherlands as patroness. At present HM Queen Beatrix is patroness of the ‘Staar’. With more than 150 singers the Staar is the biggest male concert choir in The Netherlands. Each year the choir gives about 20 concerts at home and abroad in the form of an evening performance. The repertoire is varied and comprises almost all types of music. Thanks to its own extensive archives, the Staar can choose from more than 3.000 works of music.
Concerts These cover religious, classical and modern works and music from operas, operettas and musicals as well as pop music. The repertoire is regularly renewed by adding works that have been specially arranged or adapted for the Staar. The last few years the Staar has been performing in theatres with theme-concerts. The Verdi-concerts and the ‘From Bach to Beatles’-concerts were visited by tens of thousands of devotees. In 2008/2009 the Staar performed with a jubilee programme.
Jubilee 125 years Mastreechter Staar The Royal Choir Society ‘Mastreechter Staar’ has a rich history. In 2008 it was 125 years ago that it was founded and this was celebrated in a grand way. In 2008 there were a number of performances in collaboration with the ‘Limburg Symphony Orchestra’ which celebrated its 125 anniversary in the same year. Besides three New Year concerts and two mega concerts in Limburg there were two gala concerts of which one was in the presence of Princess Maxima, wife of the future King of The Netherlands. During 2008 and 2009 the Staar performed with the programme ‘Mastreechter Staar 125 years’. This is also the title of a CD which is for sale on the market. In 2009 the Mastreechter Staar gave jubilee concerts in London and Luxemburg and the choir did a concert-tour in Slovenia with performances in Ljubljana and Bled as well as other places.

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Bèr Schellings (bass-baritone)

Michiel Ballhaus (piano)

Roger Moens (conductor)

Composer(s)

Edvard Grieg

Edvard Hagerup Grieg was a Norwegian composer and pianist. He is widely considered one of the leading Romantic era composers, and his music is part of the standard classical repertoire worldwide. His use and development of Norwegian folk music in his own compositions put the music of Norway in the international spectrum, as well as helping to develop a national identity, much as Jean Sibelius and Antonín Dvořák did in Finland and Bohemia, respectively. Grieg is regarded as simultaneously nationalistic and cosmopolitan in his orientation, for although born in Bergen and buried there, he travelled widely throughout Europe, and considered his music to express both the beauty of Norwegian rural life and the culture of Europe as a whole. He is...

Edvard Hagerup Grieg was a Norwegian composer and pianist. He is widely considered one of the leading Romantic era composers, and his music is part of the standard classical repertoire worldwide. His use and development of Norwegian folk music in his own compositions put the music of Norway in the international spectrum, as well as helping to develop a national identity, much as Jean Sibelius and Antonín Dvořák did in Finland and Bohemia, respectively.
Grieg is regarded as simultaneously nationalistic and cosmopolitan in his orientation, for although born in Bergen and buried there, he travelled widely throughout Europe, and considered his music to express both the beauty of Norwegian rural life and the culture of Europe as a whole. He is the most celebrated person from the city of Bergen, with numerous statues depicting his image, and many cultural entities named after him.

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Giuseppe Verdi

Giuseppe Verdi is viewed as one of the most important, and most popular, opera composers of Italy. Few composers knew how to balance artistic ideals and commericial interersts like him. He was a composer of 'hits', like his "La donna è mobile" from his opera Rigoletto and his "Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves" from his opera Nabucco, and he was careful not to have his audience feel bored at any moment. Especially his early works are characterised by strongly propelling, rhytmic power. A common example is his Il Trovatore. Yet, Verdi was also a composer with ideals. If he would get intrigued by a character, it became his mission to portray to persona as best as he could in the music. This sometimes meant he was forced to alter or neglect traditional opera forms, like he did in Rigoletto. He was not afraid to touch on socially sensitive matters, which at times led to issues with the establishment. For instance, his opera La traviata turned out to be a controversial one, due to its courtesan heroine. Verdi never engaged in the intellectual discussions on music of his time. He pretended to be a simple man who felt most at home in the countryside. Nonetheless, with the masterful fugal ending of his last opera Falstaff he undoubtedly showed his intellectual level of composing.

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Carl Maria von Weber

Carl Maria von Weber was a German composer, conductor, pianist, guitarist and critic, one of the first significant composers of the Romantic school. Weber's operas Der Freischütz, Euryanthe and Oberon greatly influenced the development of the Romantische Oper (Romantic opera) in Germany. Der Freischütz came to be regarded as the first German 'nationalist' opera, Euryanthe developed the Leitmotif technique to an unprecedented degree, while Oberon may have influenced Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream and, at the same time, revealed Weber's lifelong interest in the music of non-Western cultures. This interest was first manifested in Weber's incidental music for Schiller's translation of Gozzi's Turandot, for which he used a Chinese melody, making him the first Western composer to use an...

Carl Maria von Weber was a German composer, conductor, pianist, guitarist and critic, one of the first significant composers of the Romantic school.
Weber's operas Der Freischütz, Euryanthe and Oberon greatly influenced the development of the Romantische Oper (Romantic opera) in Germany. Der Freischütz came to be regarded as the first German "nationalist" opera, Euryanthe developed the Leitmotif technique to an unprecedented degree, while Oberon may have influenced Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream and, at the same time, revealed Weber's lifelong interest in the music of non-Western cultures. This interest was first manifested in Weber's incidental music for Schiller's translation of Gozzi's Turandot, for which he used a Chinese melody, making him the first Western composer to use an Asian tune that was not of the pseudo-Turkish kind popularised by Mozart and others.

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Charles Gounod

Charles-François Gounod was a French composer, best known for his Ave Maria, based on a work by Bach, as well as his opera Faust. Another opera by Gounod occasionally still performed is Roméo et Juliette. Although he is known for his Grand Operas, the soprano aria "Que ferons-nous avec le ragoût de citrouille?" from his first opera "Livre de recettes d'un enfant" (Op. 24) is still performed in concert as an encore, similarly to his "Jewel Song" from Faust.
Gounod's biography is characterised by "artist allures". His moods would swing between ambition and despondency, restless efficacy and crisis, affection and twistful behaviour, marital faith and an inclination for extramarital affairs. In his youth, he dreamt of becoming a priest and living in obscurity. For a long time he called himself abbé (father, in a religious sense) and he wore a cassock. Gounod died at Saint-Cloud in 1893, after a final revision of his twelve operas. His funeral took place ten days later at the Church of the Madeleine, with Camille Saint-Saëns playing the organ and Gabriel Fauré conducting. Ironically because of its obscurity today, an arrangement of "Que ferons-nous avec le ragoût de citrouille?" was performed by Saint-Saens at the funeral, due to its simple, folk-like melody. It was later published as a posthumous Op. 60. He was buried at the Cimetière d'Auteuil in Paris.

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Paul McCartney

Richard Rodgers

Jerome Kern

John Lennon

Tim Rice

Oscar Hammerstein II

Gabriel Fauré

Gabriel Fauré was a French Romantic composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers. Among his best-known works are his Pavane, Requiem, Nocturnes for piano and the songs Après un rêve and Clair de lune. Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composed many of his most highly regarded works in his later years, in a more harmonically and melodically complex style.
Fauré's music has been described as linking the end of Romanticism with the modernism of the second quarter of the 20th century. When he was born, Chopin was still composing, and by the time of Fauré's death, jazz and the atonal music of the Second Viennese School were being heard. During the last twenty years of his life, he suffered from increasing deafness. In contrast with the charm of his earlier music, his works from this period are sometimes elusive and withdrawn in character, and at other times turbulent and impassioned.

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Dmytro Bortniansky

The Russian composer Dmytro Bortnianski studied Moscow as well as St Petersburg. In the latter city, he studied under Baldassare Galuppi, with whom he left to Italy. This journey was sponsored by Catharina II of Russia. In Italy, he continued his studies in Bologna, Rome and Naples. He is mostly known the his motets and operas Venice (1776) and Modena (1778). In 1779, he returned to St Petersburg where he composed several operas, piano sonatas and songs. The liturgical movies he wrote for the Russian-orthodox church is still recorded and performed regularly today. In this religious music Bortniansky combines Eastern and Western European influences.

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