Brighton Festival Chorus & RPO feature works by three contemporary women composers at Cadogan Hall

On 16 July, the Brighton Festival Chorus will be joining forces with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by James Morgan, at the Cadogan Hall for a concert that teams up Mozart's Requiem with three works by contemporary women composers, Libby Croad, Dobrinka Tobakova and Juliette Pochin.

Libby Croad's Suite for String Orchestra, which was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 for International Women's Day in 2018, was written a chamber orchestra at St. Martin in the Fields. 

Dobrinka Tabakova's Centuries of Meditations was commissioned for the Three Choirs Festival in 2012, Dobrinka says, "Seeing the newly restored windows at Hereford Cathedral was the immediate inspiration for this piece. I saw at once how I could use the light from each one to illuminate the writings of the 17th century priest and mystic, Thomas Traherne. The challenge was to put the prose into singable rhythms and shapes".

Juliette Pochin's piece, Let There Be Peace, is a collaboration with Lemn Sissay. A setting of Lemn's poem for chamber orchestra and semi-chorus, the work was commissioned for the 2020 Brighton Festival. Due to the pandemic, it featured as part of the Brighton Festival online that year. This will be its first live performance.

The concert concludes with Mozart's Requiem which was famously completed after his death by his pupil, Franz Xaver Süssmayr. Uniquely for this performance, the Sanctus and Benedictus, thought to be exclusively the work of Süssmayr, will be substituted for movements written by Mozart himself. The soloists in the Requiem will be Natasha Page, Joanna Harries, Thomas Elwin and Jonathan Brown.

Full details from the Cadogan Hall website.