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.

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Last updated: 19 January 2020