Remembrance Sunday

Our annual Remembrance Sunday service is on 12th November and begins earlier than usual at 10:50am with the traditional two-minute silence at 11am after the playing of the Last Post.

Remembrance Sunday is one of the most solemn services in the church’s year as we gather, along with others across the country, to pay tribute to those who lost their lives fighting for their country in a tradition that began over a century ago in 1919.

The service will include a liturgical performance of Duruflé’s Requiem Mass sung by St Bride’s Choir and accompanied by the St Bride’s Orchestra, which begins with the Pie Jesu from the mass whilst commemorative wreaths are laid on the altar steps.

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Maurice Duruflé is one of the great Parisian church organist-composers of the 20th century.

Incredibly self-effacing, he spent considerable time re-working his compositions to achieve what his desired level of perfection.

Duruflé uses the plainsong chant of the burial service as the raw material for his setting and reworks the model and structure of Fauré’s Requiem, a composer whom he very much admired. He aimed ‘to reconcile, as far as possible, Gregorian melody and rhythm… with the exigencies of modern meter.’

The result is one of the sacred choral masterpieces. Its strength lies in the fusion of disparate elements, plainsong, liturgical modality, subtle counterpoint, and the sensuous harmonies and refined scoring of Debussy, Ravel and Dukas.

Duruflé wrote:

This Requiem is not an ethereal work that celebrates detachment from earthly concerns, it reflects… the anguish of man before the mystery of his final end. It is often dramatic, or filled with resignation, hope or terror, like the very words of the Scripture used in the liturgy. It is intended to convey the feelings of human beings faced with their terrifying, inexplicable or comforting fates.