I invite you to the first concert of our 2005-2006 series in my first year as the choir's Music Director. This 42nd season brings three concerts, each of a completely different character. Our performance, The Book of Psalms, showcases the skills and musical versatility of the choir in a selection of a cappella music spanning more than 400 years.

The Psalms have inspired composers throughout history to write great music. The texts talk about very substantial human expressions in the context of the church: to praise, to be thankful or to ask for help. Our concert is centred on Psalm 100 (O be joyful in the Lord) in settings by Schütz, Mendelssohn and Anderson, presenting 400 years of praise to God.

We start the concert with a Renaissance composition in the Venetian style by Giovanni Gabrieli: 3 choirs create a wide range of colours and echo effects that were best suited for the different balconies in the Basilica San Marco in Venice.

From Italy, we travel to Germany, where we find, in the music of Schütz and Schein, the most sophisticated Psalm compositions of the Baroque. The set of three Psalms by Mendelssohn (Opus 78) is one of the best sacred a cappella works written in the Romantic period and is one of the two main works in our performance. In his symphonic writing, Mendelssohn uses two choirs and up to 8 soloists to set the words of Psalms 2, 22, 43 and 100.

With the composition by the Estonian Cyrillus Kreek, we come to our second main œuvre of the evening. His Taaveti Laulud (The Psalms of David) is an extensive collection of compositions Kreek started when he was 25. In the first, Taaveti Laul 22, we experience a young man in search of spiritual stability: the harmonic progressions are unexpectedly courageous, the mood is tense and the character of the music ranges from almost whispering to crying out loud. The second in our selection of three, Taaveti Laul 104, has a beauty to it that cannot be described in words. In Taaveti Laul 137, written exactly 30 years after the first one, we find the spiritual approach resolved: a wise man is talking to us. Long and elegiac seem the phrases when we listen to the words, "By the rivers of Babylon - there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion."

Our last three short works show today's approach to the Book of Psalms. Dieter Schmeel, a church musician in Hamburg, is known for his "Gebrauchsmusik" (music composed for a specific, identifiable purpose), which has spread all over Germany's parishes in the last decade. Ross Bernhardt's setting of Psalm 23 uses the Hebrew text of The Lord is my shepherd, the only work in our program in this language. We conclude our travel from 16th century Italy and arrive finally in Canada in the 21st century. The setting by Robert Anderson, a former member of the choir, is the last Psalm 100 pillar in our journey. It's an exuberant and sophisticated finish with the words, "O be joyful in the Lord all ye Lands."