www.vasarisingers.org

Vasari Singers featuring Gabriel Jackson
Jeremy Backhouse (conductor)

St Martin-in-the-Fields hosts the world premiere of a new work by one of the most celebrated contemporary composers in the UK.

Commissioned by the Vasari Singers, Gabriel Jackson’s new Requiem encompasses the traditional Latin Mass movements with vernacular texts from other poetic traditions, cultures and faiths creating a modern Requiem Mass with a wide-ranging resonance in today’s multicultural, secularised society.

Jackson explains the work: “My new Requiem interweaves sonorous, slow-moving settings of the hieratic, unchanging words of the Latin rite with more immediately personal meditations on death by Tagore, Hôjô Ujimasa, Walt Whitman, the Australian Aboriginal poet Kevin Gilbert and the 18th-century Mohican Chief Apuhumut. These various texts from other spiritual traditions all express a similar view of death to the Christian one - that it is not the end, but the gateway to another life."

According to Vasari’s musical director, Jeremy Backhouse, “Gabriel Jackson is one of the outstanding composers working in Britain today. He is becoming increasingly well known for his sacred choral music which has incredible depth and intensity. The choir commissioned Gabriel in 2005 for our 25th anniversary and his work became an instant favourite with choir and audiences alike. I believe that musicians should always strive to push boundaries and look to create something new. Vasari is committed to supporting British composers and since 2000 we have commissioned 20 new works, a record of which I am immensely proud. This new requiem will stand as a signature piece for the choir and marks our on-going commitment to creating new choral music”. The Vasari Singers is one of the most versatile and popular chamber choirs in the country. Since winning the prestigious Sainsbury's Choir of the Year competition in 1988 broadcast on BBC Television, the choir has established an impressive reputation as group which performs a particularly varied repertoire to the very highest standards.

The choir performs regularly at St John's, Smith Square, as well as other major venues in London and the Home Counties. It also sings regularly in the country's leading cathedrals; for many years it has sung services in Canterbury during cathedral choir breaks, and Midnight Mass in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Eve. The choir revels in the variety of venue and bookings; for example, they have joined the BBC Big Band and BBC Concert Orchestra for a concert on BBC Radio 2 broadcast live throughout Europe, they also featured in the BBC's moving Songs of Praise on the Hospice movement from Holy Trinity, Clapham Common. More recently they provided the chorus for a semi-staged production of Donizetti's Caterina Cornaro at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, conducted by Richard Bonynge. In 1999, the choir made its debut at the Proms, singing Schoenberg and Holst with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, a concert broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and subsequently shown on BBC1.

View interview at: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ymQGghervmo

Click here to read our interview with Gabriel Jackson

Photograph by Sim Canetty-Clarke

Programme
Lotti - Crucifixus
Gesualdo - O vos omnes
Palestrina - Missa Papae Marcelli
Todd - The Rose
Todd - Lead me Lord
Todd - Lighting the way
Todd - Mass in Blue

Vasari Singers
Jeremy Backhouse Conductor

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