Vocalis warmly invites you to join them for a musical evening of meditation and devotion in the comfortable surroundings of the Wesley Centre. Musical Director James Savage-Hanford has put together a glorious programme of choral and instrumental music drawing on Lenten themes of Christ’s crucifixion and adoration of His mother Mary, alongside other prayerful invocations.

The evening will include male and female composers across the centuries, from Italian-born Antonio Lotti who composed his 8-part Crucifixus around 1719, up to the current day with Cornish-born Kerensa Briggs’s Media vita. Vocalis will perform Sergei Rachmaninov’s wonderful Bogoroditsye Dyevo (from the All-Night Vigil) and two pieces by the contemporary Estonian composer Arvo Pärt: The Deer’s Cry and The woman with the alabaster box. Other composers included in the evening are Amy Beach, Pablo Casals, Knut Nystedt, Henryk Górecki, Ola Gjeilo and Caroline Shaw.

James has paired the choir’s resplendent a cappella offerings with instrumental music provided by cellist Doug Badger and pianist Matthew Kam, who will perform another Arvo Pärt piece, Spiegel im Spiegel, as well as Olivier Messiaen’s extraordinary Louange à l’éternité de Jésus from the Quartet for the End of Time (composed and first performed in 1941 while Messiaen was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp).

Refreshments will be available during the interval.