Hesperos returns this spring with a meditation on tenderness, welcome, and refuge, shaped around Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem and Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands. We are very pleased to be joined by the Eledone String Quartet for both of these works, and also by Ben Bloor.

Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem is a work fundamentally about rest. Written in 1947 as France was still recovering from the Second World War, it deliberately avoids the drama and terror found in most requiem settings. Instead, Duruflé built his music directly on the ancient Gregorian chant melodies of the Requiem Mass, the same plainchant that has offered comfort to mourners for over a thousand years. By clothing these timeless melodies in gentle, shimmering harmonies, he created something that feels both ancient and immediate, an invitation into peace rather than a confrontation with death. The music does not demand anything, but simply offers sanctuary. In this way, Duruflé’s Requiem reminds us that the need for rest and refuge is universal and enduring, connecting us across centuries to all who have sought solace in these same quiet songs.

Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands asks a direct question: what are these wounds in the midst of our hands? Written in 2016 as a response to the seventeenth century cantata by Dietrich Buxtehude, Membra Jesu nostri, Shaw’s work begins in meditation on the earlier piece, but quickly turns outward to confront the refugee crisis unfolding around the world. The piece weaves together fragments of ancient sacred texts with Emma Lazarus’s words from the Statue of Liberty, “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, alongside displacement statistics from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. Shaw inverts Buxtehude’s original question about Christ’s wounded hands to ask instead about our own: what have we done, and what is our responsibility to those seeking refuge? The final movement offers a simple, repeated promise: “I will hold you.” In making the score freely available, Shaw stated her intention plainly: “Let us open our hands to those of others. Walls are not the answer. We are all creatures.” To the Hands is music that reaches out an extended hand towards anyone searching for safety and welcome.

Around these two pieces, we are performing two great works of conciliation and care, in the form of William Byrd’s Tribulationes civitatum and Thomas Tallis’s In manus tuas. Tribulationes civitatum is a prayer sung by those who have no home. Written in the late 1580s, it sets a text from the Book of Judith that speaks with devastating clarity: “We have heard of the tribulations which the cities have suffered, and our hearts fail. Fear and despair have fallen upon us and our children. The very mountains refuse to receive us.”

Tallis’s beautiful, perfect motet In manus tuas sets one of the most profound acts of trust in the entire biblical tradition: “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.” These words from Psalm 31 have carried people through their darkest moments. Tallis’s setting, published in 1575 during the reign of Elizabeth I, treats this ancient prayer with remarkable simplicity and intimacy. There is no elaborate polyphony or dramatic gesture, just voices gently placing themselves alongside each other. The act of commending one’s spirit is an act of complete surrender, of letting go when there is nothing left to hold on to. In this way, In manus tuas speaks to the deepest human need for refuge, not just shelter from external threats, but the more fundamental need to be held, to be received, and to place ourselves trustingly into hands that will not let us fall.

 Programme

Tribulationes civitatum - William Byrd

To the Hands - Caroline Shaw

1. Prelude

2. in medio / in the midst

3. Her beacon-hand beckons

4. ever ever ever

5. Litany of the Displaced

6. i will hold you

In manus tuas, Domine - Thomas Tallis

-Interval-

Requiem - Maurice Duruflé