by Mark Tiarks | Link to Article
The Santa Fe Desert Chorale will open its 2026 season with an appropriately named Renaissance Splendor concert on Sunday, July 12, at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi.
It features 20 of the chorale’s 32 voices this summer, with additional splendor provided by five members of the Incantare instrumental ensemble, plus organist Maxine Thévenot and theorbo player Richard Savino.
There’s also a teeny bit of cheating going on with the title, Joshua Habermann, Desert Chorale’s artistic director admits. “It’s really Renaissance and Baroque music both, and it’s music that was written right as that change from one era to the other was happening,” he says.
“I just am fascinated personally by eras in history where things are changing, not where things are stable,” he continues. “There’s an established style that everybody loves, but there’s also these new ideas interacting with it. Those seem to me to be the most fertile artistic times in human history.”
The program opens with Giovanni Gabrieli’s “Plaudite, Psallite,” (“Clap Your Hands, Sing Praises”), which Habermann describes as “an example of everything new at this period. It has three four-voice choirs, which are spatially divided, big effects — loud, soft, high, low — and everything is high contrast. It’s like singing in Technicolor.”
