BBC Singers

As part of a weekend of music from the BBC Orchestras and Choirs celebrating the BBC Centenary in October 2022, the BBC Singers explore a programme of choral music reflecting British choral music then and now.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G minor, premiered 100 years ago in 1922, was a game-changer for English choral music – a piece whose pastoral harmonies may sound like the stuff of English soil and summertime, but whose distinctive atmosphere reconnected the country’s music with a tradition that had lain dormant for four centuries. Here, the Mass’s movements are interspersed with contemporary works that harbour the same sense of peace and spirituality.
After the interval Howard Goodall conducts the European premiere of his own Unconditional Love. Written in lockdown, the cantata was conceived as ‘a work of gratitude, of memorial and of hope for a world rebuilt’ after the pain of the pandemic. This radiant piece from one of the UK’s most communicative composers sets poetry written in times of hardship, much of it in 2020 and some by Goodall himself.

Live from Milton Court, London. Presented by Natasha Riordan.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Mass in G minor (except Credo)
Judith Weir: Love Bade Me Welcome
Melissa Dunphy: Mourning into Dancing
Roxanna Panufnik: Child of Heaven
Philip Herbert: Agnus Dei
Errollyn Wallen: PACE
Henry Walford Davies: God be in my head
Arnold Bax: This worldes joie

Interval

Howard Goodall: Unconditional Love: A Cantata of Gratitude and Remembrance (European premiere)

BBC Singers
Howard Goodall (conductor)
Francesca Massey (organ)
Richard Pearce (piano)
Bella Tromba Brass Ensemble: Jo Harris, Becca Toft (trumpet); Anneke Scott, Jo Withers (horn); Emma Bassett, Becky Smith (trombone); Hanna Mbuya (tuba)