*Postponed* Bristol Choral Society

*Concert postponed to January 2021 due to coronavirus – new date to be confirmed. Please contact Bristol Choral Society or the Colston Hall box office for more information*

Stravinsky Sonata for Two Pianos
Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms
Fauré Requiem

Bristol Choral Society
Bristol Ensemble
Hilary Campbell Conductor

Steven Kings piano
Vanessa Bowers soprano

Not for Fauré the Requiem ‘shock and awe’ of a Mozart, Berlioz or Verdi. Refined over a decade, his mass for the dead sustains an abiding solace discharged in the luminescent hope and reassurance of the concluding In Paradisum. ‘Someone’, observed Fauré approvingly, ‘has called it a lullaby of death’, adding that for him death wasn’t something painful but ‘an aspiration to happiness above’.

First though there’s profound spirituality of a different order as glittering woodwind, brass, two pianos and harp queue up to refract the laser-sharp light of Stravinsky’s triptych ‘symphonizing the singing of psalms’ – ‘poems’ he confided, ‘of exaltation, but also of anger, judgement, and even curses’. It’s prefaced by more Stravinsky, this time in black and white: his wartime Sonata for Two Pianos, a work shot through with a crystalline neoclassicism.

Tickets

£11 to £28, under 25s £5 incl booking fee, seniors 10% discount.

Click here to buy tickets via the Colston Hall box office, or telephone 0117 203 4040.