Oakfield Choir’s Frome Festival performance

Oakfield Choir will be performing in the Frome Festival on Monday 9th July, with a varied programme of popular concert favourites: Faure’s Requiem and Cantique de Jean Racine, Mendelssohn’s Hear My Prayer, and Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

The festival performance will follow the sellout success of Oakfield Choir’s Verdi Requiem, which took place in May.

For their next performance, Oakfield’s regular dedicated members are also joined by singers from other choirs, swelling the ranks to around 70!

Faure’s Requiem was premiered in full in 1900 during the Exposition Universelle in Paris and though, as is usual in a requiem mass, it uses the latin text from the Catholic Mass for the dead, Faure said his requiem was, ‘dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest.’

His Cantique de Jean Racine was written by Faure, aged nineteen, for a competition at École Niedermeyer de Paris, the church music school he attended from age nine, and it won him first prize.

Felix Mendelssohn’s Hear My Prayer was written in1844 and is most famous for the ‘O for the Wings of a Dove’ solo recorded in 1927 by boy soprano, Ernest Lough, and Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor is simply one of the most famous works in the organ repertoire.

Soloists joining Oakfield will be Ella Corlett (soprano) and Hugh Alabaster (baritone), the organist is Nick Edwards and the choir and orchestra will be led, as always, by musical director, Neil Moore.

The performance starts  on Monday 9th July at Holy Trinity Church at 6.00pm. Adult tickets £10 (including a glass of wine) and under 16s free, purchased from the Cheese and Grain box office.