[POSTPONED TO APRIL 2] Concert: The Legacy of Love

UPDATE: This concert has been postponed to Sunday, April 2, at 4:00 p.m. In its place on the original date (February 26) will be a service of Choral Evensong with a pre-service talk beginning at 3:30 p.m. The Duke Chapel Evensong Singers, directed by the Chapel's Dr. Philip Cave, present a concert of three masterful contemporary compositions for choir and organ with themes of sacrifice and offering. Admission is free. Parking is available on a first-come-first-served basis in the Bryan Center garage at 125 Science Drive. ADA parking is available in the Bryan Center Surface Lot at the same address. Gerald Finzi's anthem Lo, the full, final sacrifice is one of the finest works in the English choral tradition, from the pen of a twentieth-century British composer whose sensitivity to poetry is legend. For this piece, Finzi sets to music two seventeenth-century poems by Richard Crashaw that celebrate the gift of the Eucharist. The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt's Salve Regina was composed in 2001 and, as in many of his sacred choral works, he achieves great effect from quite minimal gestures. The music in this setting of the traditional Latin hymn to the Virgin Mary develops from a unison choral song into 8-voice polyphony. The rhythm of the Marian text has a direct influence on the sober 3/4 meter of the composition. The twentieth-century composer and pianist Kenneth Leighton's cantata Crucifixus pro nobis sets to music words by the seventeenth-century poets Patrick Carey and Phineas Fletcher. Composed for tenor solo, seven-part choir, and organ, it dates from 1961 and includes some severe and dissonant writing-ending with a sublime setting of Fletcher's poem "Drop, drop slow tears." Tenor soloist Anighya Crocker performs with the choir.