Evensong Singers Concert This Sunday

The Duke Chapel Evensong Singers, directed by the Chapel’s Dr. Philip Cave, will present a concert "The Legacy of Love" this Sunday, April 2, at 4:00 p.m. The performance will include three masterful contemporary compositions for choir and organ with themes of sacrifice and offering. The composers featured are Gerald Finzi, Arvo Pärt, and Kenneth Leighton.

Admission is free. Watch the livestream here:

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.