Bristol Choral at Clifton Cathedral

Bristol Choral Society are very pleased to bring you this programme – which was due to be performed March 2020. It was one of the very first cancellations of the pandemic, but luckily the music had already filled us with inspiration in Bristol Choral.

Not for Fauré was the Requiem ‘shock and awe’ of a Mozart, Berlioz or Verdi. Refined over a decade, his Mass for the Dead sustains an abiding solace discharged in the luminescent hope and reassurance of the concluding In Paradisium. First though, there’s profound spirituality of a different order as glittering woodwind, brass, two pianos and harp queue up to reflect the laser-sharp light of Stravinsky’s triptych ‘symphonising the singing of Psalms’.

It’s prefaced by more Stravinsky, his time in black and white: his wartime Sonata for two pianos, a work shot through with crystalline neoclassicism.