Chester Music Society Choir

The music for this Crucifixion was written by Bryan Kelly in Cairo where he has taught and conducted at the Conservatoire, the Opera and the American University for many years. The libretto consists of traditional biblical extracts, poems by George Herbert and Anne Ridler, as well as stanzas from The Shield of Achilles by W. H. Auden.

Dvorák worked on his Mass from March to June 1887. It was first performed in England in March 1893 at the Crystal Palace. Dvorak has created in this setting “ ... the specific atmosphere of the Czech countryside: not a stately ritual ceremony....but the spirit of a smiling, pleasant region of hills and woods and little baroque churches with folk-art decoration, the expression of the wisdom and security of his native land”.

Durufle's Pie Jesu is taken from his setting of the Requiem and is a short solo piece for mezzo-soprano.

A Trilogy of War Poems by Wilfred Owen set for tenor and piano by Graham Jordan Ellis: Anthem for Doomed Youth; At A Calvary near the Ancre; The Send-Off. These settings were written by Graham Jordan Ellis as part of a degree finals composition folio. Although performed at that time, they were never published and rather forgotten about until recently when he discovered them during refurbishment of his study! Graham has always had a love of the poems of Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon and others, with their bleak, but bittersweet qualities: the futility, the destruction, the yearning for the peace and tranquillity of home. These sentiments are very much reflected in the music and in the recurring bell motifs throughout echo the opening line “What passing bells for these who die as cattle?”.