KEY POINTS:
What: Musica Sacra - Buxtehude's Membra Jesu Nostri
Where and when: St Matthew-in-the-City, Good Friday, 3.30pm and 8pm
"It's that week," sighs conductor Indra Hughes when asked how Musica Sacra's Good Friday concerts are shaping up. Over the past few years, these have been immensely popular.
One reason for their appeal is that they are free (with the chance for a donation at the end) but, says Hughes, "this is a day which has inspired so much wonderful music, as well being a time when not many other organisations are putting on competing events.
"I also feel there is quite an amount of people out there who want to make some observance of Good Friday without necessarily spending three hours in a church doing devotions."
Tomorrow the focus will be on Dieterich Buxtehude (1637-1707) with a performance of his Membra Jesu Nostri, a sequence of seven short cantatas based around various aspects of the crucified body of Jesus.
In his lifetime, Buxtehude's reputation was as an organ composer, Hughes stresses, and "a flashy virtuoso performer on the instrument" - spurring the 20-year-old Bach to walk 400km from Arnstadt to Lubeck to hear him play.
"Buxtehude was a showman and an impresario as well. He organised a series of evening concerts and very cannily got all the local businessmen to pay for them, even down to purchasing the instruments and financing the seating."
However, there is nothing flashy about tomorrow's Membra Jesu Nostri. "A literal transcription of the title could be Jesus' Body Parts," Hughes explains.
"The first cantata starts by considering his feet and then we work up the body to the heart and finally the head. It's a bit as if you are contemplating a painting of the Crucifixion by Van Der Weiden or Van Eyck, running your eyes over it very slowly, being drawn in."
John Wells will play the Donald Barriball Memorial Chamber Organ which Musica Sacra acquired in 2006. "The instrument is settling well," says Hughes, "and gives a wonderful visual focus as it's such a beautiful thing to have in the middle of the players."
Heading the bill tomorrow is a particularly strong quartet of soloists in Pepe Becker, Kate Spence, Iain Tetley and Hadleigh Adams.
While the first three are well-known to Auckland choral audiences, Wellingtonian Adams is a new face and voice.
The capital has already enjoyed the young singer's enterprising recital of the Aids Song Quilt, featuring music composed by contemporary American composers; Adams was also in good voice for a supporting role in Matthew Suttor's recent The Trial of the Cannibal Dog.
In May, as one of NBR New Zealand Opera's Emerging Artists, he will feature in the cast of La Boheme.
"I often feel opera singers are like bodybuilders," Hughes confides.
"It's the Arnold Schwarzenegger thing, hideously and unnaturally over-developed. They can have this enormous volume but not the musicianship.
"So it was great to invite Hadleigh to join us, because he has not only the voice but the artistry and the musicianship to go with it."
