It was a joyous day with the BBC Singers at Snape Maltings with Britten Pear Arts for Aldeburgh Festival.
We opened with Thea Musgrave’s richly harmonic Rorate Coeli, a setting of two interleaved poems by Scottish poet William Dunbar. There then followed a choral odyssey through Britten, Palestrina, Schoenberg and Kidane. The programme culminated with Francis Poulenc’s Figure humaine, a searing masterpiece famously given its premiere by the BBC Singers in 1945. Written in secret during the Nazi occupation of France, it’s a setting of poems by Paul Éluard that journey through the human spirit from grief and tyranny to freedom, ending with a searing cry of “Liberté.
Programme
Thea Musgrave Rorate coeli
Benjamin Britten A.M.D.G.
Palestrina Rorate coeli
Interval
Daniel Kidane The Song Thrush and the Mountain Ash
Arnold Schoenberg Friede auf Erden, Op.13
Francis Poulenc Figure humaine