Senior Choral Concert: Stanford's Mass in G - Saturday 27th April, 7.30pm

The massed forces of the London Oratory School Choirs and Choral Society join to present a concert of music by two composers associated with our own London Oratory Church, and accompanied by professional symphony orchestra. This concert will take place on Saturday 27th April at 7.30pm at St James’s Church, Sussex Gardens.

At the core of the programme is Charles Villiers Stanford's sumptuous Mass in G, commissioned by Thomas Wingham, the first Director of Music of The Brompton Oratory, and first performed there in 1893 shortly after the completion of the church, but tragically after Wingham’s early death. The work has rarely been heard since, and certainly not with its wonderful orchestration, as the hand-written score and parts were guarded at The Oratory since its first performance, and only recently donated to the Royal College of Music where Stanford was the first Professor of Composition. The London Oratory School has been given privileged access to these scores, and we are looking forward to sharing this special piece in the centenary year of the composer’s death alongside his Three Latin Motets and a specially-composed orchestration of his epic anthem For lo, I raise up.

Edwardian gentleman-composer Edward Elgar married his wife Alice in the Brompton Oratory in 1889, and our professional orchestra (LOS Sinfonia) will perform his popular Cockaigne Overture which describes the bustle of turn-of-the-century cockney London, and his orchestral anthem Give Unto the Lord.