From the sorrow of conflict to the quiet strength of resilience, and the joy of renewal, this is a concert of choral music on themes of struggle and flourishing. All profits to Médecins Sans Frontières.

Imogen Holst’s Mass in G Minor and Benjamin Britten’s Flower Songs celebrate nature’s cycles of growth and renewal, while Alberto Ginastera’s haunting Lamentations and the Ukrainian poet Natalia Tsupryk’s Tyhoyi Nochi confront the rawness of grief and endurance. The latter sets a poem by Serge Chadian and an extract from President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech on the Day of Victory of Nazism in World War II (9 May 2022).

Ginastera’s cycle sets the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and is therefore a meditation on exile and loss. Rautavaara’s Lorca Suite blazes with passion and defiance. Rautavaara, though Finnish, always felt Lorca to be geographically distant, yet close in atmosphere — that of mysticism, of nature, of strong metaphors with a taste of earthiness. That atmosphere — its variations in the four poems — was the starting point of the composition, but it is impossible to think of these settings of Lorca’s without remembering his death at the hands of a fascist firing squad at the very onset of the Spanish civil war, whether on account of his political leanings or sexuality, or both, is not certain.

These are interjected with moments of stillness. Eleanor Daley’s Grandmother moon is a setting of a mystical text by a Mi’kmaq poet, Mary Louise Martin, who lives on a small island in British Columbia. The text describes the beauty and tranquillity of a full moon, as well drawing on indigenous traditions of the natural world. Tavener’s well-known Mother of God, Here I Stand asks for hope and stillness.

Programme

Lamentaciones de Jeremías Propheta - Alberto Ginastera

1. 'O vos omnes'

2. 'Ego vir videns'

3. 'Recordare'

Tyhoyi Nochi - Natalia Tsupryk

Lorca Suite - Einojuhani Rautavaara

1. Canción de jinete (Lorca Suite)

2. El grito (Lorca Suite)

3. La luna asoma (Lorca Suite)

4. Malagueña (Lorca Suite)

Media vita in morte sumus - Nicolas Gombert

Interval

Mass in A Minor - Imogen Holst

Grandmother Moon - Eleanor Daley

Flower Songs - Benjamin Britten

1. To Daffodils

2. The Succession of the Four Sweet Months

3. Marsh Flowers

4. The Evening Primrose

5. Ballad of Green Broom

Mother of God, here I stand - John Tavener