Ercu Summer Concert: Mozart Requiem

Join us for ERCU’s summer concert, when we will be singing Mozart’s Requiem and Richard Blackford’s Pietà.

Mozart’s Requiem is one of the greatest and most popular works in the choral repertoire. A work of inward and outward drama, it was composed at a tumultuous time by the supreme musical dramatist of his age.

Richard Blackford is one of the foremost concert composers in Europe. In his much-acclaimed Pietà, which won the Ivor Novello Composer Award in 2020 for the Choral Category, the text of the Stabat Mater is interwoven with poems from the Requiem cycle by Anna Akhmatova, whose husband was taken and “disappeared” by Stalin’s KGB; her son was also arrested and she was convinced she would never see him again. Blackford chose the title after seeing Michelangelo’s marble Pietà in Rome: like the sculpture, his work encompasses grief, rage and sorrow together with tenderness, poignancy and, ultimately, beauty and hope.

Edinburgh Pro Musica Orchestra Michael Bawtree conductor