[Postponed] Vaughan Williams Dona Nobis Pacem & Britten Ballad of Heroes (Choral Society of Durham Concert, Tickets Required)

This concert is presented by the Choral Society of Durham. Tickets are required—purchase tickets.

Vaughan Williams’ haunting and dramatic cantata “Dona nobis pacem” is an impassioned and eloquent plea for peace, written in 1936 as horrific memories of World War I were being echoed in the growing fears of a second such war. Words from the traditional mass are interwoven with graphic and gripping images from Walt Whitman’s Civil War-era poetry as well as texts from the Bible and even a political speech made in the House of Commons. The Choral Society performed this timeless musical masterpiece in Carnegie Hall in 2006 and in Vienna in 2009, and now again in 2020, the year of the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. Also on the program is Britten’s little-known 1939 “Ballad of Heroes,” a setting of texts by Auden and Randall Swinger, is described as a “passionate outburst against the waste and horror of war.”