Thursday 3 November 2016

Royal Free Singers Autumn Concert 2016

Goodall: Eternal Light and Rutter: Mass of the Chilren

Composed by two of this country’s more accessible modern composers, the two works in this concert focus on youth and childhood.  Goodall’s Eternal Light: A Requiem combines texts from of the Latin Requiem Mass with English poems whose common theme is compassion for the bereaved.   It was composed in 2008 to mark the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War, in which so many young lives were lost.

In Rutter’s Mass of the Children the primary role of the children’s chorus, featuring the Dedworth Middle School Choir, is to sing English poetical texts, which reflect on or illuminate that of the Latin Mass.  These include works by the seventeenth-century Bishop Thomas Ken, William Blake's “The Lamb” and, in the final movement, the composer’s own texts based on those by the sixteenth/seventeenth century author Lancelot Andrews and the fifth-century Irish poem known as “St. Patrick's Breastplate”.