Concert series to feature Fauré's 'Requiem' March 31

Trinity Episcopal Church's 2019 Concert Series continues with Gabriel Fauré's "Requiem" featuring Trinity Choir and the Chicago Bach Chamber Choir with strings, harp and organ.

The concert, conducted by Gregory Gyllsdorff, will be at 3 p.m. Sunday, March 31, at the church, 218 E. Benton St., Aurora.

The program also includes Fauré's "Cantique de Jean Racine" and "Ave Verum," Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Kyrie" and Agnus Dei" from Missa Brevis," and "Ubi Caritas" by Maurice Duruflé.

A reception will follow. A freewill offering will be taken to benefit the organ restoration fund.

Gabriel Fauré composed his Requiem in D minor, Op. 48, between 1887 and 1890. The choral-orchestral setting of the shortened Mass for the Dead in Latin is the best-known of his large works. Its focus is on eternal rest and consolation. Fauré's reasons for composing the work are unclear, but do not appear to have had anything to do with the death of his parents in the mid-1880s. Fauré writes, "My Requiem wasn't written for anything - for pleasure, if I may call it that!" He composed the work in the late 1880s and revised it in the 1890s, finishing it in 1900.

In seven movements, the work is scored for soprano and baritone soloists, mixed choir, orchestra and organ. Different from typical Requiem settings, the full sequence "Dies irae" (the Day of Judgement) is omitted, replaced by its section "Pie Jesu." The final movement "In Paradisum" is based on a text that is not part of the liturgy of the funeral mass but of the burial.

Fauré wrote of the work, "Everything I managed to entertain by way of religious illusion I put into my Requiem, which moreover is dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest."