Brighton Festival Chorus

Brighton Festival Chorus
Brighton Festival Youth Choir
James Morgan conductor

Brahms Four Songs, Op. 17
Holst Choral Hymns from the Riga Veda, Op. 26;Two Eastern Pictures; Ave Maria

Following the English Chamber Choir and Cardinal’s Music, this short concert series of Friday evening choral concerts concludes with an evening of candlelit song in the lofty splendour of St Bartholomew's Church.

While the men of Brighton Festival chorus take centre stage for Shostakovich’s Babi Yar, this concert sees the turn of the women singers who are joined here by their counterparts from Brighton Festival Youth Choir, celebrating their tenth anniversary this year. Together they perform four songs by Brahms and showcase the vocal works of Gustav Holst. After evoking the esoteric East with hymns from the Riga Veda (one of Hinduism's sacred Sanskrit texts) and Two Eastern Pictures (set to the spring and summer cantos of Kalidasa’s poem Ritsusamhara), they conclude with Holst’s tender and moving Ave Maria (1900), an eight-part setting for double female chorus, dedicated to the memory of the composer’s young mother.