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Classical Music - Fauré’s
Requiem
“It has been said that my Requiem does not express the
fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death,”
said French composer Gustave Fauré about the funeral mass
he wrote in 1888. “But it is thus that I see death:
as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above,
rather than as a painful experience.” Fauré’s
piece, which is being performed tonight by Lewes’ own
East Sussex Community Choir, was a radical work in its time:
he took two traditional elements out of the Mass, the Dies
Irae, and the Rex Tremendae, adding in their place the In
Paradisum; thus he got rid of the idea of hellfire and damnation,
replacing it with a more comforting vision of the afterlife.
The East Sussex Community Choir, run by the County Council
and directed by Jozif Koc, is composed of talented adult amateurs
who train every week of term-time in Priory Chapel, where
they are performing Fauré’s masterpiece tonight, as
well as other well known French choral works. However powerfully
the choir perform Fauré’s Requiem, we are sure they
will not achieve the poignancy of the requiem’s most
famous rendition in 1922 during the composer’s funeral.
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