Choral Evensong - 3 July 2016

This service was the final service of the academic year 2015-16. The Choir now have a week off before returning to chapel for a week of recording.

Anton Bruckner is known mainly as a symphonic composer - he composed nine symphonies in total, the last unfinished. His other most notable outputs as a composer were his masses and motets. Christus factus est (WAB 11) is a setting of a gradual text, a text which Bruckner set to music three times, this being the third. The piece was published together with three other graduals: Locus iste, Os justi and Virga Jesse.

Howells's Gloucester Service was one of his first settings of the evening canticles. Despite the dedication to Gloucester Cathedral, the work was not written to fulfill any commission. It was, however, written in the wake of the success of the Collegium Regale setting, composed a year earlier for King's College, Cambridge.

Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen is the fourth movement of Brahms's op. 45, Ein deutsches Requiem ('A German Requiem'). There are seven movements altogether including passages for soprano solo and baritone solo. Brahms opted against the traditional latin text of the Requiem mass and instead set various scriptural passages in German, meaning that the work is sacred but non-liturgical in function.