Faire is the Heaven

In a fast age that hurtles forward relentlessly, there remains – mercifully – a refuge carved from stillness, reverence, and beautiful sounds. This evening we offer sanctuary in Romantic choral music for double choir. Several of the works we are presenting this evening offer a soulful meditation on grief and loss, from which depths these pieces extend a trembling hand stretched defiantly towards the divine.

William Harris’s Faire is the Heaven opens the evening with the promise of what’s to come after death, which we observe as through a stained-glass window, radiant with rosy hue. Then, composed in the twilight of his final days, Lord, let me know Mine End was Hubert Parry’s final farewell. Here mortality is not mourned but measured, with two choirs asking one another for comfort and understanding in the face of going hence.

Mendelssohn’s Denn er hat seinen Engeln befohlen follows – a bright light to contrast with the darkness of the final measures of Parry; a prayer of protection along all our paths, in this life and the next. Duruflé’s Four Motets then unfold, replete with Gregorian memory and enriched further by lush French harmonies, with the final mournful movement Tantum Ergo setting the stage for our final piece of the evening.

Herbert Howells’s Requiem was written in the wake of unspeakable personal tragedy in 1932, and not published until almost 50 years later, in 1981. As such it emerges as a work not of death, but of the long, unending echo grief leaves behind. The Requiem alternates between single and double choir movements; in the latter, Howells conjures dissonant, shimmering sound worlds which present heaven in painful juxtaposition to the earth.

An evening of fantastic sounds!