Northwest Choral Society to perform Vaughan Williams works in Des Plaines
Northwest Choral Society’s 2025-26 concert season concludes at 4 p.m. Sunday, May 3, at the Trinity Lutheran Church in Des Plaines, with a program of works by the 20th-century English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.
The program features the composer’s Five Mystical Songs for chorus and baritone soloist, as well as the hauntingly beautiful Mass in G minor for double choir.
NWCS’ collaborative pianist Lori Lyn Mackie will accompany the chorus on the organ.
Ralph Vaughan Williams’ (Oct. 12, 1872 — Aug. 26, 1958) works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions. including nine symphonies, written over 60 years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.
Vaughan Williams refused a knighthood and declined the post of Master of the King's Music; the one state honor he accepted was the Order of Merit in 1935, which confers no prenominal title. His academic and musical honors included an honorary doctorate of music from the University of Oxford.
The Five Mystical Songs are a musical composition written between 1906 and 1911. The work sets four poems (“Easter” is divided into two parts, with “I get me flowers,” along with “Love bode me welcome,” “the call,” and “Antiphon”) of 17th-century Welsh poet and Anglican priest George Herbert from his 1633 collection “The Temple: Sacred Poems.” While Herbert was a priest, Vaughan Williams himself was an atheist at the time (he later settled into a “cheerful agnosticism”), though this did not prevent his setting of verse of an overtly religious inspiration. The work received its first performance in September 1911, at the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester, with Vaughan Williams conducting. Michael Tedesco will sing the baritone solo at the NWCS concert.
The Mass in G minor was written in 1921. It is the first Mass written in a distinctly English manner since the 16th century and follows Vaughan Williams’ experience as an ambulance driver in France during World War I, in which he suffered the loss of close friends and relatives. The composer dedicated the piece to Gustav Holst and the Whitsuntide Singers at Thaxted in north Essex, but it was first performed by the City of Birmingham Choir in December 1922. The Mass is written for double choir, and divided into five movements: Kyrie, Gloria in excelsis, Credo, Sanctus, Osanna I — Benedictus — Osanna II, and Agnus Dei.
Tickets for the Vaughan Williams concert are $20 for adults and $15 for students and seniors and can be purchased online at nwchoralsociety.org, by calling (224) 585 -9127, or an hour prior to the concert at Trinity Lutheran Church, 675 E. Algonquin Road, Des Plaines.
The Vaughan Williams concert will be the final performance for NWCS’s 2025-26 season; rehearsals for the next session begin after Labor Day. Information regarding NWCS’s July Summer Chamber Choir Intensive week will be publicized on nwchoralsociety.org.
Join the society
The Northwest Choral Society invites experienced singers to audition to join the organization, which was founded in 1965. Basses, tenors, altos and sopranos with previous choral experience who are at least 17 years old can obtain additional information about the Northwest Choral Society at nwchoralsociety.org.