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Poulenc: Gloria & Vaughan Williams: Hodie

17th of November, 2018

A feast of beautiful 20th Century choral music comes to Worcester Cathedral this November, as Worcester Festival Choral Society performs two, outstanding works.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s glorious ‘Christmas Cantata’ Hodie (This Day) was the composer’s last major choral-orchestral work. Celebratory and richly scored, this brilliant musical mosaic premiered under Vaughan Williams’s own baton at Worcester Cathedral as part of the Three Choirs Festival in 1954.

WFCS is proud to reprise the work in the same nave, 64 years later.

The concert also features Francis Poulenc’s Gloria, which combines a vivid expression of faith with mischievous irreverence and a sense of pure enjoyment.

“When I wrote this piece’, Poulenc recalled, ‘I had in mind those frescoes by Gozzoli where the angels stick out their tongues; and some serious Benedictine monks I had once seen revelling in a game of football.’ 

Performing with the 140 members of Worcester Festival Choral Society will be the boy choristers of Worcester Cathedral Choir and Voluntary Choir, the 50-piece Meridian Sinfonia symphony orchestra and acclaimed soloists Susanna Fairbairn (soprano), Tom Robson (tenor) and Alex Ashworth (bass-baritone) (all pictured). WFCS music director Christopher Allsop conducts. 

 
 

 

 

 
Previous Concerts
 

A list of all our previous concerts from 1990 onwards can be see here

To see the old flyers from previous concerts click here