It is almost 50° F. so am not even going to try to pretend...

That it is 'cool', although the occasional breeze is, and the rain is downcoming now-- not when I was out for my spatiamentum, however.

It is the feast of Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus, the Wonderworker (Divinum Officium, Introibo, Catholic Encyclopedia); Holy Mass is livestreamed from Saint-Eugène in Paris at 1000 Pacific. 

Estonia has such a healthy, strong tradition of choral singing-- girls, boys, men, women. It is celebrated on the public broadcasting service just as much as contemporary musical performance is. Today, e.g., Klassikaraadio is livestreaming a concert (at 0900 Pacific) that will feature the premieres of nine choral works for five different types of choirs (if the translating machina hasn't nodded off).

Musica Ficta is performing, inter alia, the Stabat Mater and Te Deum of Domenico Scarlatti in Copenhagen at what I hope is 1120 here. 

Together we have composed a program of a selection of the 555 [sonatas], but also the best of Scarlatti's wonderful vocal works, which have never received the appreciation they deserve. First and foremost, the 10-part Stabat Mater, which in an incomparable way evokes the grief of the Mother of Jesus at her Son's Cross. But there are also Mass movements and a glorious Te Deum for double choir, and even arias from Domenico's operas. And in all this, Musica Ficta is accompanied by Bjarke Mogensen's accordion, which here provides the continuo part, the basis for almost all music from the Baroque.

I've never heard the accordion play the continuo so am happily awaiting this. Mogensen's 2018 CD recording of 11 Scarlatti sonatas is at Spotify. It would require an effort for me to listen to an hour straight through but playing continuo with an ensemble is a different matter, I hope. 

Time for Terce and then breakfast.

I notice that Isaac Sligh at the New Criterion's 'Critic's Notebook' (the current ephemera in fact 'recommendations on what to read, see, and hear' in the week) has this morning commented on Cappella Romana's re-creation of the Office of the Holy Cross (Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia) at the venerable Basilica in Constantinople. He seems rather late to this but the vagaries of publishing are incomprehensible.

This album of medieval Byzantine chant, the result of ten years of collaboration between the vocal ensemble Cappella Romana and Stanford University’s Department of Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, takes on a new meaning in the wake of Turkey’s recent decision to convert the Hagia Sophia from a museum back into a mosque. The album uses cutting-edge technology to simulate the acoustics of the nearly 1,500-year-old structure, which, for its first thousand years as a Christian cathedral, reverberated with the echoes of Byzantine chant. It might be the closest we will get to hearing such sounds for the foreseeable future.

***