Tampa Oratorio Singers to perform Mozart's Great Mass in C minor as free hurricane relief benefit

Mozart fans, who have been paying $20 to see the Tampa Oratorio Singers, will get to see the choral group perform his Great Mass in C minor for free on Sunday, Nov. 10th at Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church in Tampa.

Though the volunteer chorus’s board has voted to raise the admission fee for future performances to $30, its members decided to make this concert a free hurricane relief benefit, says Sally Olsson, a singer with the group and member of its marketing committee.

“The board just felt that members of our chorus had been through so much with these storms, and so has our audience, so they decided that they wanted to make this a free concert as a gift to our community,’’ she says. “We’re all just stricken by the devastation that people are facing.’’

While the concert is free, the group is accepting donations for Feeding Tampa Bay, she says, but that is completely voluntary.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote the mass for his new bride, Constanze, “who apparently had a really remarkable voice,’’ says Olsson, a Mozart buff and former flutist with the Florida Gulf Coast Orchestra and Florida Orchestra. She says Mozart promised Constanze that he would write a mass for her after they were married and the C Minor Mass is the result.

After marrying in Vienna, the couple traveled to Salzburg so that she could meet Mozart’s father, a stern, dictatorial taskmaster who was a dominating presence in his son’s life. The mass was first performed in 1783 in the Church of St. Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg with his father in attendance. It was the only performance while Mozart was alive.

“No one seems to know why it was never performed again,” Olsson says.

He died with the mass unfinished, she says. 

“But it’s still considered probably his greatest work for the church,’’ Olsson says.

Soprano Susan Hellman Spatafora, who has performed with the Palm Beach Opera, Sarasota Opera, South Florida Lyric Opera and the Oakland Symphony, among others, is one of the four soloists performing the work. Hellman Spatafora was thrilled to be asked to again perform the mass, which she performed with the Tampa Oratorio Singers in 2015, she says in a press release.

“The music is not only gorgeous, but it represents for me a most welcome musical challenge!’’ she says in the press release.

“From the first soprano solo, ‘Christe Eleison,’ the vocal acrobatics and octave jumps indicate that this is a work that requires a skill set befitting The Magic Flute’s Queen of the Night aria,” Hellman Spatafora continues in her statement. “These intricate ‘arias’ are seated amongst solemn choral movements and fugues reminiscent of Bach and Handal.’’ 

“No wonder that this complex and beautiful mass is counted among Mozart’s best works,” she concludes.’

Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church is located at 3501 W. San Jose St. in Tampa.

For more information, go to Tampa Oratorio Singers