Your events at Classical Events
Details
St John the Baptist Church
Holland Road
Shepherd's Bush
London
W14 8AH
England
Tickets
Prices: General admission £16, Under 25 / Student / Unwaged £11
Book Tickets
Programme
Kenneth Leighton – God's Grandeur
Thomas Tallis – Thou wast, O God, and thou wast blest
Gustav Holst – The Evening-Watch, Op.43 no.1
Robert White – Christe qui lux es et dies (I)
John Tavener – Butterfly Dreams
Ralph Vaughan Williams – Three Shakespeare Songs: 'The Cloud Capp'd Towers'
Reena Esmail – Tuttarana
Martin Frank – Mass for double choir
Performers
Other concerts in this Series (+)
Programme Note
This concert is built around two twentieth-century choral works, John Tavener’s Butterfly Dreams and Frank Martin’s Mass for double choir. Tavener sets short poems and texts drawn from dispersed places and times to create a strange, hallucinatory, fluttering piece that suggests the many different implications of the butterfly. Martin’s Mass for Double Choir, while becoming one of the most popular mass settings, was written in 1922 but left in the bottom of a drawer for forty years, as if cocooned and entirely hidden from view; he later said, “Through a sort of instinctive modesty I have done nothing to have these pieces performed. It sufficed me entirely to have written them”.
Around these are interspersed pieces that deal with time, nature, and ephemerality, much like a still life. From Tallis and Gibbons’ delicate musings on the impermanence of creatures, and Holst’s setting of mystic and metaphysical Henry Vaughan’s dialogue between the soul and the body, to Leighton’s setting of Gerald Manley Hopkins’ ‘God’s Grandeur’, Vaughan-Williams’ setting of Prospero’s final speech from TheTempest, and Reena Esmail’s gloriously meslismatic Tuttarana.
