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”.
