Chancel Choir to Present “Requiem”

by John Rutter (b. 1945)

All Saints Sunday is a liturgical day in which we remember those who have gone from this world into the next. As a part of this special service, the Chancel Choir, with members of the Charlotte Symphony, will present John Rutter’s Requiem Sunday, November 4. This work quickly is becoming one of the standards in choral literature. Rutter set his Requiem text in 1985 one year after his father’s death. To add to this family tragedy, John Rutter’s son, Christopher, died tragically in 2000. The Rutter family knows too intimately the pain of grief.

The link is quite evident between Rutter’s Requiem, Benjamin Britten’s War Requeim, and Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, the latter of which sung by the MPBC choir last All Saints Sunday. The two works, Rutter’s and Faurè’s, have a good deal in common in terms of shape and simplicity (or economy) of means. Both include a beguiling setting of the “Pie Jesu” for solo soprano, though in Rutter’s work this movement includes some brief choral interpolations. It stands to reason that Rutter must have drawn some inspiration from Fauré, for in 1983, only two years before composing his own Requiem, Rutter published a new critical edition of Fauré’s score. There also exists a probable influence of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem upon Rutter’s setting. As a chorister at Highgate School, John Rutter had taken part in the premiere recording of War Requiem in 1963 under the direction of Britten himself. Rutter follows in the footsteps of Britten by composing a work which is something of an anthology. In his War Requiem Britten combined the Latin Mass texts with poems in English by Wilfred Owen. The words which Rutter uses, apart from those of the Latin Mass, are also in English, though he chooses scriptural texts, from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, rather than secular poetry.  

We invite the congregation of MPBC and the greater Charlotte community to join us for this most moving of worship services at 11:00 a.m. in the MPBC Sanctuary Sunday, November  4.