On Easter Sunday we will be celebrating the resurrection of Christ, accompanied by and orchestra and the Cathedral choirs.
For our Eucharist service at 10:30am and Evensong at 4pm, all three of our choirs - adults, girls and boys - will join together at both to fill the Cathedral with sound. They will be joined by an orchestra at 10:30am.
The choral mass at Eucharist will feature Haydn's Missa Sancti Nicolai. Composed in 1772, this was the sixth of Haydn's 14 masses and is by turns exhilarating, heavenly and sublime. The orchestra will not only support our choirs but will also solo part of Mozart's 29th symphony.
The music for Evensong at 4pm will be dominated by two of Charles Villiers Stanford's compositions. At the age of 25, Stanford was appointed organist at Trinity College, Cambridge. Over the next 15 years he radically improved the quality of choral singing at Trinity and substantially expanded the range and quality of pieces sung. And so, by degrees, he moved from being the outsider who grew up in Dublin to being part of the Victorian establishment, gaining a knighthood in 1902.
In 1879, aged 27, Stanford composed his Te Deum in B, which immediately signalled his compositional brilliance. Like all of his mature music, the Te Deum shows his reverence for the music of Brahms, and his break with the moribund style of earlier Victorian composers. Stanford's Evening Service in C (Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis) was composed thirty years later, in 1909. Over the intervening years, he had revolutionised Anglican choral writing, both by example and through his pupils, who included Gustav Holst, Herbert Howells and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
The service also features Vaughan William's resounding Antiphon "Let all the world in every corner sing". It was completed in 1911, around the same time as his magnificent Sea Symphony. It is the last of his "Five mystical songs", an Easter cycle based on poems by the 17th century Anglican priest George Herbert.
Come and join us as we worship on this very special Sunday.