The Santissima Annunziata (Holy Annunciation) is the church situated opposite one of the best gelati places in the first square one comes across on Barga’s main street from its gateway at the fosso.

The church was built in 1595 to house two wooden statues of the Virgin Mary and the Announcing Angel sculpted by a Tuscan master of the early fourteenth century. The church’s interior is baroque, almost Rococo, in its delicate plasterwork.

In the church’s transept are two large nineteenth-century frescoes depicting the Marriage of the Virgin and the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple painted by Giammattei in Lucca, who also decorated the cupola.

I’d never ventured inside the church before and was quite surprised at the beauty of its interior. This immaculate setting and its fine acoustics gave a special resonance to the three choirs which feasted us last Friday and continued an end-of-term tradition which has become an annual feature of Barga’s lively musical scene.

This was the programme for the evening:

The first choir from Lucca’s Istituto Machiavelli under their conductor Marco Musto warmed us up with a sweet arrangement of ‘Danny Boy’  sung with rather good English pronunciation. The other items were also very adequately delivered. Amazingly the last item was only rehearsed three days previously. This, in my opinion, is a choir that can only develop to greater heights.

The second choir needs no introduction. Don Toti’s expertise with high renaissance polyphonic music is one of the joys of Garfagnana and his choir’s interpretation, especially of Victoria’s ‘O Magnum Mysterium’, filled the church with radiant effect. I felt, however, that the tenor section needed better blending with more numbers. Any volunteers?

Andrea Salvoni’s indefatigable efforts in creating a choir from Barga’s  I.S.I. institute has produced a group that is fully able to approach a variety of idioms from classical to gospel. I particularly enjoyed the ‘Pie Jesu’ from Webber’s ‘Requiem’. The duet singing of Caterina Pieretti and Maria Carla Lupi was quite ravishing.

The choir received a well-deserved extended applause:

It’s not an easy thing to get a choir together in Italy. The British tradition of cathedral choirs with their impeccably high standards simply does not exist in Italy and too many schools do not have adequate facilities to devote much time to music. Standards in so many choirs here are not all that high and recruitment to them is another problem. The fact that we were able to hear and truly enjoy three choirs, each one with its own character, and each one with singers and directors who have devoted voluntarily so much of their free time to music, augurs well for the future of Italian choral singing in the Lucchesia.