Saturday 22 March 2025, 7pm

at St. George's Church, Beckenham BR3 1AX

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Mozart C Minor Mass

​Guest Conductor: James Morgan

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Haydn, Insanae et Vanae Curae

Mozart, Exsultate, Jubilate

Mozart, Ave Verum Corpus

 

We are delighted to welcome James Morgan as our Guest Conductor for this concert, while our Musical Director Mark Griffiths fulfils his commitments at the Royal Opera House. James has a dazzling CV which includes conducting credits with ENO, Glyndebourne, RPO and the BBC Singers to name but a few!

 

The C Minor Mass, generally considered to be Mozart’s greatest choral work after the Requiem, is renowned not only for its monumental structure and musical beauty, but for its contrasting and interwoven styles. With inspirational cadenzas, impassioned choral dialogue and syncopated variations it is by turns powerful, exhilarating and profound, building to a dramatic climax.

 

Like the Requiem it is an unfinished work, the reasons for this remaining a subject for much speculation amongst Mozart scholars to this day. It was premiered in 1783 in Salzburg, with Mozart’s wife Constanze as one of the two sopranos given soaring melodic arias and thrillingly competitive duets.

 

We have matched the Mass with the “absolutely gorgeous” (Classic FM) Exsultate, Jubilate and the meditative beauty of the Ave Verum Corpus, alongside Hadyn’s Insanae et Vanae Curae, with its vivid back-and-forth struggle between war and peace.

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