Choral Service
"Requiem: A Thanksgiving for Life"
Palm Sunday 2 April
6.30pm
All are welcome - no admission charge
with Trinity Festival Choir
Conductor Stephen Haylett
Organist Ian LeGrice
This service includes a performance of Philip Ledger’s Requiem ‘A Thanksgiving for Life’, as well as an extended choral movement from Mendelssohn’s ‘Christus’.
Sir Philip Ledger was Director of Music at King’s College, Cambridge in the 1970s, and composed his Requiem in 2007, conducting the first performance in King’s College chapel in November of that year. It is subtitled ‘A Thanksgiving for Life’ and the usual Latin movements of the Requiem Mass are interspersed with settings of some wonderful poems by the mystical English poet, Thomas Traherne. The piece begins with the birth of the soul and ends with its final journey to paradise, and includes a softly yearning Pie Jesu, sung by a soprano solo.
The Requiem will be preceded by two short movements from other works, namely Charles Villiers Stanford’s Magnificat in C and Mendelssohn’s ‘There shall a star from Jacob come forth’ from his unfinished oratorio ‘Christus’. The latter piece combines wonderful dramatic choral writing with a calm resolution of the chorale ‘How brightly shines the morning star’.
