Great Classics: Rejoice & Requiem: CANCELLED

Conductor - Stephen Layton
Soprano - Sara Macliver
Baritone - Laurence Williams
Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir
Director - Karen Grylls

Britten - Simple Symphony
Handel - Music for the Royal Fireworks
Fauré - Requiem [1883 ed. Rutter]

‘Once upon a time there was a prep-school boy’, wrote Britten. ‘There was one curious thing: he wrote music, reams of it’. The former prep-school boy recycled some of his best juvenilia into this captivating piece.

Handel’s splendid Fireworks Music was composed for a grand celebration, marred only by stray pyrotechnics burning down some buildings. The APO’s pyrotechnics will be solely musical.

Fauré saw death as ‘an aspiration towards the happiness of the hereafter’; his bright, serene Requiem entirely omits Judgment Day. The great British choral conductor Stephen Layton returns to the APO with Fauré’s intimate, rarely heard original version.