Poems of Ecstasy

As a themed palette-cleanser before Scriabin’s calorific Poem of Ecstasy, the BBC Singers invite you to wallow in the pure beauty of Josquin des Prez, who died 500 years ago in 1521, and the UK premiere of an avian lament from American composer Hannah Lash. 

In 1480, Josquin des Prez made his own setting of the moving poem depicting the mother of Christ witnessing her son’s crucifixion, the Stabat Mater. Josquin’s music unfolds in sixteen stately paragraphs, restrained but open-hearted. Lash wrote her Requiem pro avibus mortuis in 2012. It is a devotional work that ‘mourns the loss of birds that have either become extinct or endangered.’