Britten   Simple Symphony
Handel   Music for the Royal Fireworks
Fauré      Requiem [1893 ed. Rutter]

‘Once upon a time there was a prep-school boy’, wrote Britten. ‘There was one curious thing: he wrote music, reams of it’. The former prep-school boy recycled some of his best juvenilia into this captivating piece.

Handel’s splendid Fireworks Music was composed for a grand celebration, marred only by stray pyrotechnics burning down some buildings. The APO’s pyrotechnics will be solely musical.

Fauré saw death as ‘an aspiration towards the happiness of the hereafter’; his bright, serene Requiem entirely omits Judgment Day. The great British choral conductor Stephen Layton returns to the APO with Fauré’s intimate, rarely heard original version.

Conductor Stephen Layton
Soprano Sara Macliver
Baritone Laurence Williams

Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir
Director Karen Grylls