Requiem

The programme is entitled 'Requiem' with the first part commemorating the 400th anniversary of the death of William Byrd with a performance of his Mass for 5 voices.

The second half of the concert is made up of movements from the Requiems of Mozart, Duruflé and Herbert Howells amongst others.We also remember the assassination of John F Kennedy with Herbert Howells' 'Take him, earth, for cherishing'. In his own sleeve note to the 1967 recording by King’s College Choir, Howells wrote: ‘Within the year following the tragic death of President Kennedy in Texas plans were made for a dual American-Canadian Memorial Service to be held in Washington. I was asked to compose an a cappella work for the commemoration. The text was mine to choose, Biblical or other. Choice was settled when I recalled a poem by Prudentius (AD 348–413). I had already set it in its medieval Latin years earlier, as a study for Hymnus Paradisi. But now I used none of that unpublished setting. Instead I turned to Helen Waddell’s faultless translation […] Here was the perfect text—the Prudentius ‘Hymnus circa exsequias defuncti’.’