Gozo’s Gaulitanus Choir has recently returned from its 21st venture abroad, where, between July 27-31, it was concert touring Venezia and Padova, Italy. While this was the choir’s eighth trip in Italy, this was its first in the Veneto region.

This concert tour – part of Gaulitanus’ envisaged broader programme of international events – followed an invitation from the Associazione Vivaldi Festival and its founder and artistic director Enrico Castiglione.

The choir was invited to participate in the 3rd edition of the Vivaldi Festival, which featured an impressive line-up of international artists.

The Gaulitanus Choir brought the Vivaldi Festival to a close with a concert on July 28 – the 282nd death anniversary of the great Baroque Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi – at the San Salvador Church in Venice.

The programme – alternating instrumental with vocal numbers – was principally devoted to works by Antonio Vivaldi, ‘il prete rosso’, and complimented by works by other composers from the late Renaissance or the early Classical eras. 

The programme alternated instrumental with vocal numbers

The concert opened with two Vivaldi works: the Sonata a 4 in Eb (Al Santo Sepolcro) followed by the Concerto in D (Per la Lingua di San Antonio) for solo violin and orchestra.

The Gaulitanus Choir then appeared for its first contribution, performing ‘a cappella’ works by Praetorius, Arcadelt and Mozart.

The orchestra continued with instrumental works by Handel and Pachelbel, eventually joining the choir in works by Bach, Pergolesi, Mozart and Cherubini as well as the choir’s soprano soloist Anna Bonello in a very expressive rendering of Alessandro Stradella’s Pietà Signore.

The choir in Padova

The concert was brought to its official ending with two other works by Vivaldi, the Laudate Dominum Omnes Gentes and the Gloria in Excelsis.

The choir complemented the concert tour with the animation of two masses in two iconic and monumental churches in the Veneto region.

The choir made it a point to include Maltese music along with other sacred excerpts from the standard international repertoire in the two masses.

Indeed, it sang (in the Maltese language) two of the most wonderful hymns penned by the Giuseppe Caruana-Dun Karm Psaila tandem (as arranged for unaccompanied choir by Colin Attard), as well as an ‘a cappella’ setting of the Pierre Louis Attard work performed during the festival’s concert.