St. Augustine Church, Victoria, was the venue for two mini-concerts which the Gaulitanus Choir gave on Saturday 4th May as part of Trail of Baroque and Classical Music, organised by the MGOZ as part of the Gozo Alive events,
Making the most of the venue’s very good acoustics, the choir’s artistic director selected six numbers which, while offering a mixture of musical styles, made up a very appealing programme. This started with a most celebrated baroque excerpt, namely the bouncy first movement from Antonio Vivaldi’s Gloria. O Salutaris Hostia by Malta’s own Pietro Paolo Bugeja, a very well-known excerpt in local sacred circles and betraying a pre-classical idiom, followed very naturally. The second chop was devoted to two very famous a cappella works from the late Romantic era: the highly expressive yet profound and reflective God so loved the world from John Stainer’s The Crucifixion and Sergei Rachmaninoff hauntingly beautiful Bogoroditse Devo, one of the most famous works in the Orthodox liturgy. The last two works performed were both local ones: Colin Attard’s Sanctus from his Missa in honorem Joannis Pauli II and Attard’s a cappella arrangement of Giuseppe Caruana’s immortal Fil-Hlewwa ta’ Mejju. These last two works also featured the choir’s soprano soloists Annabelle Zammit and Stephanie Portelli in a few solo lines.
Choir resident accompanist Stephen Attard was also in attendance, with choir founder-director Colin Attard conducting.
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