Requiem for an Angel

Up, and with Gin & Tonic to Bath Abbey to listen captivated to a deeply affecting choral concert.

Bath Abbey is a sumptuous venue in which to listen to the transcendental beauty of the massed human voice. I found myself repeatedly raising my eyes upward; my sight-lines interrupted by the delicate tracery of the fan-like ceiling of the Nave.

And each time the vision that greeted me was different, as the evening progressed and the light filtering through the stained glass windows faded and shaded gradually through blue to indigo to black.

We enjoyed a superb performance by the Bath Minerva Choir, the Bath Philharmonia and soloists Stephanie Edwards (soprano) and Derek Welton (Baritone). Gavin Carr conducted.

It was a requiem evening. The first piece performed was Requiem by Gabriel Fauré. This has long been a favourite of mine, as it is for Tonic.

Yet for me Fauré's Requiem was eclipsed and out-shone by the second piece: Requiem for an Angel by Paul Carr, a living composer who was indeed present in the audience.

Go out and obtain a recording of this piece - it is superb.

It shares the exuberance and love of life that one experiences at the wake following a Celtic funeral, of which I have had too much recent experience. No hushed, respectful tones here but a loud, exuberant, vibrant celebration of the life of the departed and a guilt-free thanksgiving that those who survive them live on.

Requiem for an Angel is a piece for listening to in the vast rolling savannahs of Africa; the sun-baked outback of Australia; the frozen flat steppes of Kazakhstan or Canada; the prairies or pampas of the Americas.

Requiem for an Angel is a piece for masering into space from the top of a tall mountain; it is the disdainful cry of the animate, the conscious, the sentient; of life against the inanimate, uncaring hostility of the cosmos: We live. We love. And we remember.


Minerva's chorus
Muse - A Requiem'd Angel
Mortal life lived; loved