A Fall Arts Celebration Holiday Gift

"Gloria: Music of the Holiday Season from Grand Valley"

Fountain Street Church
24 Fountain Street NE
Grand Rapids

Celebrate the holidays with Antonio Vivaldi's beautiful and magnificent Gloria as it rings out from the superb acoustics of Fountain Street Church when Music Department faculty members and students will join the GVSU University Arts Chorale and soloists.

One of the Baroque era's most famous composers, Antonio Vivaldi, whose striking red hair earned him the moniker il Prete Rosso, or the Red Priest, has become one of the modern world's most beloved composers.

Perhaps best known for his four solo violin concerti known collectively as The Four Seasons, the great bulk of Vivaldi's music lay virtually unknown until after the end of World War I in Europe.

Then, in 1926, through a chance discovery of nearly 400 unknown manuscripts found among crates of old documents up for sale by a cash-strapped boarding school near Turin, the music of this great Italian master was unleashed upon the modern world.

Since that remarkable event, Vivaldi, much-loved for music that is at once rhythmically vital, harmonically melodic, and full of one bright Italianate melody after another in quick and almost breath-taking manner, has become the most recorded composer in the world today.

The Gloria performed by Grand Valley music faculty members and students was among those manuscripts that had lain in near obscurity for two centuries after the composer's death.

Today, with the wonderfully sunny nature of its distinctive melodies coupled with the brilliant harmony and the rhythms so characteristic of all of Vivaldi's music, this monumental work has quickly risen to its rightful place as an enduring and much loved choral masterpiece - one that has come to represent and symbolize the very best of holiday music.

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