Paul Terracini | conductor
Cowley Fu | piano
Matthew Phillips | boy soprano
Alexander Knight | baritone
Penrith City Youth Choir
Penrith City Choir | Lucy McAlary, Director
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Russian Easter Festival Overture
SAINT-SAËNS Danse Macabre
LISZT Totentanz
FAURÉ Requiem
Four great composers, four vastly different perspectives on eternity. Drawing on melodies from Russian Orthodox liturgical chant, Rimsky-Korsakov (himself a non-believer) portrays a transition from the solemnity of Passion Saturday to the celebration of Easter morning. In Danse Macabre, Death (represented by a diabolical fiddle) calls the dead from their graves at midnight each Halloween to dance their nocturnal dance of death. Totentanz is one of many works inspired by Liszt’s morbid fascination with death, an obsession which is said to have led him to frequent hospitals and prisons to observe those condemned to die. Fauré’s setting of the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead, with its sublime “Pie Jesu”, concludes the concert with an altogether more serene and uplifting view of eternity.