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Details
St Dunstan's Church
High Street
Mayfield
Kent
TN20 6AB
England
Programme
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Exsultate Jubilate, K.165/158a
Johannes Brahms – Ein Deutsches Requiem, Op.45
George Frideric Handel – Organ Concerto in F major, HWV 292
Performers
Eloise Irving – soprano
Andrew Benians – organ
London Primavera Orchestra
Mayfield Festival Choir
Other concerts in this Series (+)
Programme Note
The 2016 Mayfield Festival opens as the last one closed – with the music of Mozart. Exsultate, jubilate was written when Mozart was just seventeen and it fizzes with teenage energy; it is also some of the most challenging and virtuosic vocal writing of the Classical era. By contrast, Handel’s organ concertos are rather religious affairs, but always with a twinkle in the eye. The F major Concerto was designed to be played during the interval at performances of oratorios at the Covent Garden Theatre in London.
Brahms said of A German Requiem: ‘I could easily dispense with the word ‘German’ and replace it with the word ‘human’’. Brahms also said that his intention was to write ‘a compassionate Requiem to comfort the living’. His Requiem isn’t Catholic church music, it is Protestant concert music. It blurs the boundaries between belief and atheism, and between misery and optimism. And it is unquestionably Brahms’ masterpiece.
