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“The music is charming and absolutely uplifting,” says Les Robinson Hadsell, founder and director of Master Singers. “I heard it years ago and loved it. The interplay between the orchestra and the choral parts creates a dancing rhythm that also conveys tremendous strength.”
So obscure is the Credo that the Master Singers undertook an international search from the Netherlands to England and, finally, Poland to obtain a copy of the nearly 300-year-old score. The Master Singers’ hunt for the Credo (RV 592) began after Ms. Hadsell, recalling her delight in the piece, decided to debut it locally. She contacted all her commercial sources of music and, to her surprise, found none with a score nor was the Credo listed with any U.S. or major European publisher. This was intriguing, and led to an extensive internet search for any kind of reference to the Credo. The only posting was by a choir in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, which offered practice tapes for singers interested in performing the work. [We] began an e-mail correspondence with the Dutch group to try to obtain the score. In the meantime, a member of the chorus’ soprano section, sought help from a nephew who is an organist in England. He contacted the library of the Royal College of Music, which traced the score to the music archives of Warsaw University in Poland and identified a Polish publisher. From this source, Ms. Hadsell was able to obtain the score.
The difficulty in locating a score suggests that what was intended as a local debut for the Credo may well have been its first performance in the United States.
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