Monteverdi Choir brings Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle to Alexandra Palace with Jakob Lehmann, fresh from BBC Proms debut
Friday 18 September, Alexandra Palace Theatre, 7.30pm
Jakob Lehmann conducting Monteverdi Choir and ORR in Rossini in 2025 c. Paul Marc Mitchell
On Friday 18 September, the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique bring Rossini’s rarely heard orchestral version of Petite messe solennelle to Alexandra Palace Theatre, conducted by Jakob Lehmann, fresh from his acclaimed BBC Proms debut at the Royal Albert Hall.
The concert offers a rare opportunity to hear the Rossini’s own orchestration of one his final and most ambitious works performed by two ensembles celebrated internationally for their vivid, historically informed approach to nineteenth-century repertoire.
Rossini called Petite Messe Solennelle the last of his péchés de vieillesse (“sins of old age”) and teasingly asked whether it was “sacred music or opera to a religious text”. That ambiguity gives the work its particular charge: poised between devotion and drama, intimacy and theatrical brilliance.
Alexandra Palace Theatre is an ideal setting for a work first heard in 1869 at Paris’s Salle Ventadour, another grand nineteenth-century theatre. More than 150 years later, audiences can experience the work in surroundings that evoke the world for which it was written.
Lehmann is fast emerging as a major force in historically informed performance. At this year’s BBC Proms, he conducted Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust with Les Siècles and the Choir of Radio France; The Guardian described it as an “energised Proms debut”.
The concert continues MCO’s Rossini collaboration with Lehmann, following last year’s acclaimed Cadogan Hall performance and a wider harmonia mundi recording project exploring the composer’s major sacred works.