Holy Cross Music Department to Celebrate 250th Birthday of Mozart with Concerts

WORCESTER, Mass. – In celebration of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, the College of the Holy Cross music department will present "Mozart’s Sacred Music," a lecture recital featuring the Holy Cross Chamber Singers led by choir director Pamela Getnick on April 24 at 4:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library. Jessica Waldoff, associate professor and chair of the music department, will lecture about the great composer’s vast output. Music will include the Gloria movement from Mozart’s Coronation Mass of 1779, as well as the beloved motet Ave verum corpus.

Both the Coronation Mass and the Ave verum corpus will be performed in their entirety in a separate concert featuring the College Choir with the Chamber Orchestra on April 21 at 8 p.m. in St. Joseph Chapel. Both events are free and open to the public.

Getnick is a graduate of the Yale University School of Music, where she received her doctorate in choral conducting. While at Yale, Getnick studied with Marguerite Brooks and David Connell and conducted both the Yale Freshman Chorus and the Yale Glee Club. Under her direction, both choruses performed the Mozart Requiem and the Rachmaninoff Vespers.

Waldoff received her Ph.D. in 1995 from Cornell University where she studied with James Webster, Neal Zaslaw, and Don Michael Randel, specializing in late 18th- and early 19th-century studies. Her studies at Cornell, including the dissertation year, were supported by a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities (1988) and a Cornell Sage Graduate Fellowship (1991-92). Her dissertation, "The Music of Recognition in Mozart’s Operas," drew on literary theory to explore both recognition as a topic and recognition scenes in these works.

She is the author of the newly-released Recognition in Mozart’s Operas (Oxford University Press) and co-author of "Operatic Plotting in Le nozze di Figaro," with James Webster, in Wolfgang Amade Mozart: Essays on his Life and his Music (ed. Stanley Sadie, Oxford University Press, 1996).

The event is sponsored by the department of music and the Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture.