On Sunday, Feb. 16, Music on Norway Pond presents its major choral concert, featuring Gabriel Fauré’s beloved “Requiem” paired with Benjamin Britten’s bewitching “Rejoice in the Lamb” at the Hancock Congregational Church. What promises to be a popular winter event features the Norway Pond Festival Singers’ 50-voice mixed chorus and organist Mary Ann Fleming with an instrumental ensemble of harp, violin, cello, and two French horns, many played by New England Conservatory musicians.
Soloists will include: baritone Thomas West, the spellbinding treble soloist Litha Ashforth, an NEC sophomore who has most recently sung with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, tenor Riccardo Hernandez (also from the NEC), mezzo-soprano Jazimina MacNeil, a graduate of Curtis School of Music.
Fauré began composing his work in the mid-1880s, with revisions over the next decade and completion in 1900. He once commented “my Requiem is as gentle as I am myself.” Rather than the thunder, lightning, and drama of requiems composed by Berlioz and Verdi, Faure wanted his “Requiem” to comfort and soothe. “It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death,” he explained, rather “someone has called it a lullaby of death… I see death as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience.”
Composed in 1943, Britten’s “Rejoice of the Lamb” sets Christopher Smart’s poem “Jubilate Agno,” written while he was in a mental ward showing a man trying to keep his sanity in an insane place. Britten turned it into a beautifully constructed cantata (10 sections in 15 minutes) with vocal fanfare-arpeggios, the organ metamorphosing into a cat and mouse, dancing rhythms, and tender harmonies –movingly capturing the poem’s half-mad and delightfully religious spirit.
Music on Norway Pond’s Artistic Director, Jody Hill Simpson, who was honored in 2017 with the prestigious Albert Nash Patterson award recognizing individuals who have made exceptional contributions to choral music in New England, will conduct this concert.
“Both of these pieces have been deep in my soul for many years,” she said, “and they feel like the perfect combination that will connect all of us – audience, singers, musicians, and even the spirits of Faure and Britten – to something hopeful and bewitching.”
In fact, these choral pieces are so meaningful to so many that this concert has received a most generous donation, underwriting its costs.
Admission is $25; students are free. Tickets may be ordered at musiconnorwaypond.org or purchased at the door in Hancock prior to the 4 p.m. performance.