All Saints' Day Requiem Eucharist

This Requiem Eucharist commemorates All Saints' Day and employs the rarely heard musical setting for the service by twentieth-century French composer Alfred Desenclos. The service includes prayers for the repose of the souls of people who have died. The Chapel's Vespers Ensemble and Evensong Singers will sing the music for the service, accompanied by Chapel Organ Scholar Daniel Jacky.

Desenclos's Messe de Requiem, written in 1963 and published in 1967, mingles elements of Gregorian chant with rich, impressionistic harmonies-showing influences from jazz music as well as fellow French composers Camille Saint-Saëns, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Duruflé, and Francis Poulenc. Desenclos's setting of the Requiem text, with its powerful imagery and language, includes passages of quiet tenderness alternating with passionate outbursts. The work draws heavily on its adventurous choral writing, and on the kaleidoscopic colors of the organ accompaniment, to create a moving and memorable setting of the Requiem Mass.

Desenclos (1912-1971) was a self-proclaimed "romantic" whose music is highly expressive and atmospheric. He was admitted to the Conservatoire de Paris college of music in 1932, where he won prizes in fugue, harmony, composition and accompaniment, supporting himself by working as maître de chapelle at the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in Paris. Desenclos won the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1942, the year in which he co-wrote the music to the film The Blue Veil.

Paid parking is available on a first come, first served basis in the Bryan Center Parking Garage at 125 Science Dr. ADA parking is available in the lot in front of the garage.

The service is being held jointly with the Divinity School's Anglican Episcopal House of Studies.

A livestream of the service available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIElBPF2Zoo .