Perth Choral Society winter concert

Dec 1 2009 by Alison Anderson, Perthshire Advertiser Tuesday

PERTH Choral Society performs its Winter Concert in Perth Concert Hall on Sunday at 7.30pm.

The programme is Gabriel Foure’s well-known and much-loved Requiem and Charles Gounod’s Messe Solennelle de Sainte Cecilia.

Faure's Requiem was last performed by Perth Choral Society in 1996 and that performance was dedicated to the children of Dunblane who were killed in March of that year.

This achingly beautiful and evocative work, written in 1888, has a spiritual depth which has the power to touch the listener with the quietly confident Christian faith from which it grew. The prevailing mood is one of peacefulness and serenity. Faure himself said of it:" My Requiem is said not to express any sense of terror in the face of death. Someone called it a lullaby of death: but that's how I feel about death – a happy deliverance, a yearning for the joys of the afterlife, rather than a painful passing away."

Gounod's Messe Solennelle de Sainte Cecilia was written in 1855 in honour of St. Cecilia in 1855. Gounod, it is said, "took certain liberties with the liturgy in this work" but his aim was to render its spirit in a manner which did honour to St Cecilia, the patron saint of music.

On hearing the first performance in November 1855, the composer Saint-Saens commented: "This simplicity, this grandeur, this serene light which rose upon the musical world like a dawn troubled people greatly; one felt the approach of a genius ... The luminous rays streamed forth from this Mass; at first one was dazzled, then charmed, then conquered."

The soloists for this Winter Concert are Libby Crabtree, soprano; Shaun Dixon, tenor; and Jonathan May, bass-baritone.

The choir will be accompanied by the Angus Chamber Orchestra (celebrating their 10th anniversary), and the society’s Director of Music, Peter Rutterford, conducts.

Tickets – £12 (£10 concessions) with accompanied children are admitted free – are available from choir members or Perth Concert Hall box office (01738 621031).

Seating for this concert is reserved, so early booking is advised.