The long-established custom of the presentation of special sacred music by St Peter’s Singers in the evening of Good Friday at Leeds Minster dates back many years. This event is held with generous support provided by the Friends of the Music of Leeds Minster.
At 7pm on Good Friday 2016, the occasion includes music by Johannes Brahms and Ralph Vaughan Williams. The first half of the evening unfolds from two magical motets by Brahms: Warum ist das Licht gegeben and the Geistliches Lied, a true masterpiece in miniature with deeply expressive organ accompaniment.
Founder-leader of the Orchestra of Opera North, violinist David Greed, is our special guest artist for the evening and he will bring the first half to a close with a performance of Vaughan Williams’s visionary Romance for violin and orchestra – The Lark ascending – inspired by a poem by George Meredith.
The work exists in at least three versions, of which that used on Good Friday is certainly the superior in terms of musical balance. It seems that Vaughan Williams may well have completed its composition by 1914, but revised it after the Great War prior to its two premières and subsequent publication five years later.
The catalyst for this remarkable and strongly eloquent recitative was George Meredith’s glorious poem printed in the preface to the score and from which The Lark Ascending takes its title. The music itself is through and through a reflection of the natural ebb and flow of the verbiage as well as of the mental and visual imageries Meredith’s muse conjurs up so very vividly.
He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.
For singing till his heaven fills
The love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
His valley is the golden cup,
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes.
Till lost on his aërial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings….
The second half of the concert is given over to Brahms’s seven-movement German Requiem. This is no conventional Requiem deploying the Latin Missa pro defunctis but a beautifully meditative concept drawing on texts from the New as well as the Old Testament. Its glorious orchestral scoring and searingly beautiful writing for choir and the two vocal soloists make for a heady mixture of memorable and often deeply meditative music that makes the work especially appropriate for hearing on the most solemn day of the church’s year – Good Friday.
There are, probably, two main influences behind the German Requiem as we now have it; the first is the tragedy of Robert Schumann (the work’s second movement began its creative life as part of an abortive tragic symphony inspired by Schumann’s plight and by the death of Brahms’s mother).
First heard at Bremen on the Good Friday of 1868, the piece at that première lacked what we now have as the fifth of the seven movements. This section was added by the time of the première of the final version in Leipzig of the year following. The first English performance was a private affair in 1871 with piano accompaniment. But the piece very soon became a great favourite with English audiences and there are still in print at least five choral scores of the piece arranged to English biblical texts with varying degrees of success. Our Good Friday performance will be sung in the original language with a full translation provided in the programme book.