Barts Choir: Vaughan Williams’s Dona Nobis Pacem

Programme

Vaughan Williams had served in the First World War, and Dona Nobis Pacem is his response both to the horror of the first and the looming threat of a second, culminating in a joyous vision of the ending of war through reconciliation between people and nations.

The angels’ song ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace’, which concludes the work, is also the starting point for the Latin Gloria, set by Poulenc in 1959. Though a largely tuneful and upbeat work, its more meditative and anguished moments are perhaps coloured by Poulenc’s personal experience of the loss of friends (which had turned him back to his Catholic faith), and of living in German-occupied Paris.

Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, his last major orchestral work, was written in the US in 1940. It uses a large orchestra to brilliant effect, but like many of his later compositions also betrays a yearning for his native Russia, which he had been forced to flee following the 1917 Revolution.