Sonya Headlam, Soprano
Justin Beck, Bass-Baritone

Requiem creates a dialog between two pieces for chorus and orchestra: the beloved Requiem of Gabriel Fauré and Seven Last Words of the Unarmed a recent (contemporary) work by Joel Thompson (b. 1988).  Thompson’s work adapts the traditional setting the “Seven Last Words from the Cross” to explore the tragedy and complex emotions of the final words of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and four other Black men whose untimely death came at the hands of those sworn to protect and serve.  Fauré’s Requiem—long a staple of choral repertoire—provides the counterpoint with its focus on eternal rest and consolation.

Accompanied by string quartet and piano, the movements of Seven Last Words vary in style, from an intense Bach-inspired fugue to lush Romantic Brahmsian harmonies, to 20th century musical theater.  At-times soaring orchestral textures are alternately in tension with the speakers’ agitated, angry and disbelieving words, or characteristic of the hopefulness for the future destroyed by the speaker’s untimely death. In contrast, Faure’s Requiem is, in the composer’s own words, “dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest,”  and that it “does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience.”

Tickets available at "Requiem" presented by the West Village Chorale or from a Chorale member.
Advance: General Admission: $30 / Student: $20
At the Door: General Admission: $35 / Student: $25