directed by Paul Halley For All The Saints: Duruflé Requiem
with chamber orchestra Ensemble Regale and guest organist Patrick Wedd

This annual tribute to those who have gone before and the opening concert of the 2018-19 King’s at the Cathedral concert series will feature the supremely beautiful Requiem by French composer Maurice Duruflé (1948). Duruflé dedicated the work to the memory of his father. He had grown weary of increasingly overblown settings of the Requiem text and decided to return to the original Gregorian chant. To this he added masterful choral and orchestral arrangements that call to the mind of the listener images of heavenly bliss deftly interwoven with a sense of human pathos and our longing for eternal peace.  

Director Paul Halley explains, “The extraordinary thing about Durufle’s Requiem is that he was really the first composer in several hundred years to be able to use early medieval Gregorian chants as the basis of his setting without compromising or destroying their integrity. Having absorbed the music of the French impressionists and benefiting from the rediscovery of a wealth of Gregorian chant, he was able to combine the modalities and tonal fluidity of both worlds, creating a work of unearthly and timeless beauty.”

The Requiem will be performed with the hand-picked chamber orchestra Ensemble Regale and guest organist Patrick Wedd.

For All The Saints will also feature O quam gloriosum est regnum (O how glorious is the kingdom) by the English Renaissance composer William Byrd, a setting of Timete Dominum omnes sancti ejus (Fear the Lord, all ye his saints) by Italian Renaissance composer Ascanio Trombetti, G. P. da Palestrina’s Nunc Dimittis for double choir, 20^th-century English composer Benjamin Britten’s Te Deum in C, and contemporary English composer Jonathan Dove’s Into Thy Hands.