Music for Epiphany 6 — Sunday, February 12 2023

Missa brevis – Richard Rodney Bennett (1936-2012)

 

Kyrie: view video here

Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.

Sanctus/Benedictus: view video here

Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory.

Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.

Agnus Dei: view video here

Lamb of God, you who take away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us.

Lamb of God, you who take away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us.

Lamb of God, you who take away the sin of the world, grant us peace.

As one of Britain’s most respected and versatile musicians, Richard Rodney Bennett produced over two hundred works for the concert hall, and fifty scores for film and television, as well as having been a writer and performer of jazz songs for fifty years. Studies with Pierre Boulez in the 1950s immersed him in the techniques of the European avant-garde, though he subsequently developed his own distinctive dramato-abstract style. In recent years, he adopted an increasingly tonal idiom. He was knighted for Services to Music in 1998.

Bennett’s choral pieces are all possessed of a gift for heart-melting, memorable and quintessentially English melody – and an instinctive lyric responsiveness to the text.

The Missa brevis, this Sunday morning’s setting of the Mass ordinary in church, and his only piece of liturgical music, was composed in 1990 for Canterbury Cathedral Choir. The piquant harmonic world of this work owes a good deal to Francis Poulenc and to Bennett’s composer hero William Walton.

Gerald Harder