Festival Mass (for A Cappella Double Choir)

First Performance: Bristol Bach Chorus, conductor Peter Leech, St.Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, 7.30pm, 29 March 2008.

FESTIVAL MASS opus 377 1987

Composer’s note: In 1987 Three Choirs Festival scheduled a performance of my dramatic oratorio ‘Benedictus’ in Worcester.  The cathedral choir was in particularly fine form with a wide vocal range and advanced standard and the musical director Dr. Donald Hunt, who knew that I was coming down for the performance, aksed if I would be interested to compose a new setting of the communion service for the ambitious medium of a cappella (unaccompanied) double choir. I asked the Dean if the work should be in English or Latin but he said he would leave the decision to me. Several nights later I virtually  ‘dreamed’ the intense opening Kyrie in Latin and this decided me. The four further movements followed soon after – an ambitious virtuosic ‘Gloria’, a solemn antiphonic ‘Sanctus’, a flowing contrapuntal ‘Benedictus’ in eight really separate parts (of which I’m particularly fond) and a minor-key Agnus Dei of great sadness which is redeemed by a move to the major only in the last four bars on the words ‘donna nobis pacem’. ‘Festival Mass’ was commissioned for Three Choirs Festival with financial assistance from West Midland Arts and given its first performance at the opening service of the festival in Worcester Cathedral on August 5th 1987 by the Cathedral Choir trained and conducted by Donald Hunt. [The Benedictus was used by the composer in 1986 for a scene in Adrian Noble’s film of Shakespeare’s’Midsummer Dream’]