Where folk, trad and early music meet
- the common grounds
HISS 2024 Mon 19 - Fri 23 August
Booking for HISS 2024 is now closed
Thank you to all who have booked your place on HISS 2024
We are finally back to pre-COVID numbers
and we are delighted to be welcoming a number of overseas visitors again this year!
We will now be collating the bookings and making adjustments to the timetable
Course details and other arrangements will be updated in the coming weeks
We will be in touch with participants in due course
We look forward to welcoming you all in August for this year’s exciting course!
We are delighted and privileged to announce that our Guest Tutor for HISS 2024 is Robert Hollingworth, who will be joining us for the Orazio Benevoli workshop day. We are also working on Jephte, acclaimed in the history books as “the first oratorio”, marking the centenary of the death in 1674 of Giacomo Carissimi, a later proponent of the Roman School. he Benevoli Missa Tu Es Petrus is based on Palestrina motet, whose music we will also be celebrating.
Robert Hollingworth
As founder and director of the internationally renowned vocal group I Fagiolini Robert has a long record of truly innovative projects behind him. As erudite as it is entertaining, his way of illuminating early music and bringing it to life for the 21st century is remarkable and spellbinding.
Of the Benevoli Mass he says: “The 17th century is surely the most interesting musical period to go rooting around in. While the 16th and 18th centuries are generally more stylistically uniform, in the mid-17th century you never know what you’re going to find. Some music is better left in libraries, falling out of use with good reason; Orazio Benevoli’s Missa Tu es Petrus mass is quite spectacularly not one of those pieces.”
Orazio Benevoli (1605-72) was French by birth. His father (a confectioner from Lorraine) Italianised the surname on moving to Italy, and Orazio became a chorister at San Luigi dei Francesi, the French church in Rome, famed for the sumptuous forces it assembled to perform polychoral music on major feast days. He eventually became maestro of the unrivalled Cappella Giulia, the Julian Choir at St Peter’s, Rome, and the leading composer of what is now called the Colossal Baroque school. Of all Benevoli’s multi-choir settings for Mass and Vespers, none surpasses his Missa Tu es Petrus, based on Palestrina’s famous six-voice motet. It is music designed to overwhelm the senses. We will explore this work for four choirs, with voices doubled by instruments, and all singers and players will be able to take part, under Robert’s expert tutelage. This is an opportunity not to be missed!
If you have heard the recently released CD of Benevoli’s Missa Tu Es Petrus recorded by Robert Hollingworth and I Fagiolini, which includes our regular tutors Rebecca Austen-Brown and Richard Thomas, you will know what glorious music this is! For more on this project see this page here.
Click the link below to watch a behind-the-scenes video of the performers at work: