CSB/SJU Music: Gabriel Faure's REQUIEM

The CSB/SJU Chamber Choir, SJU Men’s Chorus and CSB Women’s Choir, accompanied by the Amadeus Chamber Symphony will combine their ‘voices’ in this year’s traditional CSB/SJU Music Department’s Spring Choral/Orchestra concert, featuring Gabriel Fauré’s REQUIEM.

Composed between 1887 and 1890, Fauré’s setting of the Catholic Mass for the Dead is the best known of his large works and, similar to Brahms’ German Requiem, which CSB/SJU performed in the Spring of 2016, focuses more on eternal rest and consolation. Fauré does not use all the traditional movements of the Requiem Mass, leaving most of the ‘sequence’, Dies irae (‘Day of wrath’), using only one section of it, which, coincidentally, in the opinion of many, is one of Fauré’s most beautiful melodies, Pie Jesu (the last two lines of the Dies irae sequence): “Merciful Lord Jesus, grant them rest”, for soprano solo.

The work is scored for soprano and baritone soloists, mixed choir, orchestra and organ. Different from typical Requiem compositions, the final movement of this work, In Paradisum is based on a text that is not part of the liturgy of the funeral mass but of the burial ceremony:  “May the angels lead you into paradise”.

Fauré wrote of the work, "Everything I managed to entertain by way of religious illusion I put into my Requiem, which moreover is dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest.”

Rounding out the concert are two other choral/orchestra works by Fauré (Cantique de Jean Racine and Pavane) as well as a short orchestra piece, Aux Etoiles, by Henri Duparc, a contemporary of Gabriel Fauré.

The choirs and orchestra are under the direction of Susan Cogdill and Axel Theimer

Soprano Marcie Givens and Bass/Baritone Hugh Givens will be the featured soloists.