7.30pm
Exeter College Chapel
Turl St, Oxford OX1 3DP
£18, £8 students / under 25
Oxford Pro Musica Singers
Mark Jordan (conductor)
Frank Martin: Mass for Double Choir, Maurice Duruflé: Requiem
Oxford Pro Musica Singers presents a thrilling programme of two of the twentieth Century’s most deeply felt choral masterpieces: Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir and Duruflé’s Requiem. Both perfectionists whose music is at once sensuous and transcendent, Martin’s inventive and expressive a cappella writing is the perfect complement to Duruflé’s fusion of spare plainsong, rich harmony and sumptuous organ accompaniment.
Rescued from a drawer where it had languished for forty years, Martin’s Mass is his only work for unaccompanied voices. His deployment of the two choirs feels almost organic in its ebb and flow – at times angular and rhythmic, at others sinuous – creating an endlessly shifting soundscape of voices which yet remains in the service of the text and its spiritual meaning. From the flexuous supplications of the ‘Kyrie’, through the ecstatic climaxes of the Gloria and Sanctus, we come to rest in the plangent ‘Agnus Dei’ which he added to the original work four years later, in 1926. Here the second choir provides a rhythmical chant as a foundation for the first choir’s beseeching melody, which builds in emotive power. The result is a truly mesmeric ending to this wonderful work.
Where Martin's background was Calvinist, Duruflé was a staunch catholic and his Requiem of 1947 – the overall shape of which is indebted to the Fauré – is firmly rooted in the timeless rhythms and melodies of plainchant. However, he melds these with lush contemporary harmonies to produce an original and utterly luminous work. Like his predecessor, Duruflé limits the hellfire (though it features in a couple of exciting episodes) and shifts the focus to a transcendent vision of eternal rest. From the organ’s limpid ripples beneath the opening intonations to the dazzling climaxes of the ‘Kyrie’ and ‘Sanctus’ in particular, Duruflé never loses sight of the beauty and rapture of the perpetual light. Our concert could find no better ending than the ethereal ‘In Paradisum’, where angelic sopranos lead you out of the organ’s shimmer until the full choir eases you over the final threshold, leaving you on a glimmering unresolved chord that fades into peace.
We hope that you will join us in the appropriately French atmosphere of Exeter College Chapel for this meditative journey that will surely leave your spirit in a place of bliss.
n.b. The concert will finish around 9pm.
Oxford Pro Musica Singers performing in Exeter College Chapel, Oxford, 2023
