Requiem
Music of Farewell and Remembrance
Tuesday 16 November 2010 at 7.30pm
Holy Trinity Sloane Square Sloane Street, London, SW1X 9BZ
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Tickets available on the door from 18.30 on the day of the concert: £14 (full price), £10 (concessions)
List of works
To mark Remembrance Day, Londinium performs a moving programme of unaccompanied choral responses to death and mourning, from Hubert Parry's powerfully lyrical Songs of Farewell to the quieter anguish of Herbert Howells' Requiem. Three haunting part-songs by contemporary American composer Eric Whitacre (including the chilling lament When David Heard) and Howells' Take Him, Earth, for Cherishing (dedicated to the memory of JFK) complete this modern-day Requiem.
The concert opens with a series of personal responses to the mystery of man's eternal rest. Parry's monumental motet series Songs of Farewell, completed shortly before the composer's own death in 1918, and haunted by the slaughter of the First World War, is a lyrical and introspective meditation on the transitoriness of life and the soul’s journey after death. The six motets express weariness with life, exaltation at the prospect of eternal peace, and a sense of uncertainty as the soul passes into the unknown.
Take him, Earth, for Cherishing, written in 1964 by Parry's much younger pupil Hubert Howells (1892-1983), is a song of farewell in remembrance of President John F. Kennedy. It is deeply expressive if not specifically religious, combining a sense of public loss with a heightened personal spirituality.
A sequence of atmospheric part-songs by celebrated American composer Eric Whitacre (b. 1970) rounds off the first half of the concert. When David Heard sets text from the Book of Samuel: 'When David heard that Absalom was slain he went up into his chamber over the gate and wept, and thus he said: my son, my son, O Absalom my son, would God I had died for thee!'. The insistent monotone repetition of 'my son' in Whitacre’s setting reinforces the pain of grief, punctuated by chilling silence. Silence ends the haunting A Boy and a Girl, who say nothing, 'never kissing, giving silence for silence'.
After the interval Londinium performs Howells' extraordinary unaccompanied Requiem, which combines the traditional 'Requiem Aeternam' with psalm text and prayers from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer – 'immemorial reflections upon the transient griefs and indestructible hopes of mankind', in Howells' words.
Although Howells started to write his Requiem in 1932, it was not completed until 1936 following the sudden and tragic death of his young son, and remained private until 1980. Despite the anguish expressed in chromatic harmonies and frequent dissonance, the work concludes with a final harmonic release of tension for 'Lux Perpetua': eternal light, symbol of hope and comfort.
This concert will be repeated at Queens College, Cambridge on 20 November 2010.
Musical Director: Madeleine Lovell
Londinium reserves the right to change the programme and performers without notice.