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GABRIEL JACKSON : Requiem
(for unaccompanied SSAATTBB choir)
Thursday 11 November, 2008
St-Martin-in-the-Fields, London
Vasari Singers, dir. Jeremy Backhouse
Oxford University Press, 2009
“My initial idea for the piece was to combine the solemn, hieratic grandeur of the great Iberian Requiems with something more personal, more intimate, even, that could reflect the individual, as well as the universal, experience of loss. So I have replaced the even-numbered movements of the standard Mass for the Dead with poems from other cultures and spiritual traditions so as to embrace a more wide-ranging perspective on human mortality than the traditional Christian one, though in the end all the texts express a similar view of death that it is not the end but the gateway to a better world. The resulting sequence of texts is radiantly optimistic, suffused as it is with images of light.
One of the challenges for any composer writing a Requiem is to achieve the contrasts of texture and colour, of motion and stasis, that are necessary to sustain a multi-movement work when the overall mood is so restrained and reflective (and, indeed, when substantial amounts of text appear more than once). I have tried to adhere to my original inspiration in that the Latin movements are more objective, more purely architectural in construction than those with words in English.”
— Gabriel Jackson
GABRIEL JACKSON : Requiem
(for unaccompanied SSAATTBB choir)
Thursday 11 November, 2008
St-Martin-in-the-Fields, London
Vasari Singers, dir. Jeremy Backhouse
Oxford University Press, 2009
“My initial idea for the piece was to combine the solemn, hieratic grandeur of the great Iberian Requiems with something more personal, more intimate, even, that could reflect the individual, as well as the universal, experience of loss. So I have replaced the even-numbered movements of the standard Mass for the Dead with poems from other cultures and spiritual traditions so as to embrace a more wide-ranging perspective on human mortality than the traditional Christian one, though in the end all the texts express a similar view of death that it is not the end but the gateway to a better world. The resulting sequence of texts is radiantly optimistic, suffused as it is with images of light.
One of the challenges for any composer writing a Requiem is to achieve the contrasts of texture and colour, of motion and stasis, that are necessary to sustain a multi-movement work when the overall mood is so restrained and reflective (and, indeed, when substantial amounts of text appear more than once). I have tried to adhere to my original inspiration in that the Latin movements are more objective, more purely architectural in construction than those with words in English.”
— Gabriel Jackson