Durham Singers: The Souls of the RIghteous

Music has been used throughout the ages to help people and communities move through mourning to remembrance, consolation and hope. Sitting between personal commemorations of the dead at the church festivals of All Saints and All Souls days and public acts of remembrance on Armistice day, our concert on 9 November draws on themes of both collective and private mourning, from the seventeenth century and the present day.

For baroque composers, funeral processions meant brass instruments, and for this concert, we are joined by the English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble, whose period instruments add their impressive sonorites to music by Purcell, Schütz and Bach.

Purcell’s funeral music for the much-loved Queen Mary was soon heard again at his own funeral later in 1695. Nearly three hundred years later the outstanding English composer Herbert Howells was commissioned to write an anthem for the memorial service for President John F. Kennedy. ‘Take him, earth for cherishing’, is one of his most dramatic and haunting works, opening out from a simple dirge at the beginning to a work of enormous power and range. Balancing Howells is quiet and gentle anthem by Francis Pott, ‘The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God’ , composed for Winchester Cathedral and somehow enfolding singers and audience in a harmonic evocation of the ‘hands of God’. This beautiful, slow rhapsody draws the programme towards a hopeful, light-infused close with Bach’s ‘Jesu Christ, mein’s Lebens Licht’.