On Friday 6 June 2025, The Symphony Choir will present “The Great Mass” featuring Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, K427 and Five Mystical Songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams.  Mozart’s Mass in C Minor is considered one of his greatest works. He composed it in Vienna between 1782 and 1783, after his marriage, when he moved to Vienna from Salzburg.  The work embodies pomp and solemnity associated with the Salzburg traditions of the time and shows influence of Bach and Handel whose work Mozart was studying at the time.  It is written for double choir, and soloists include two Sopranos, a Tenor and a Bass.

In a letter to his father, Leopold, dated 4^th January 1783, Mozart mentioned a vow he had made to write a mass when he would bring his fiancée, Constanze, as his wife to Salzburg.  At its premiere which took place in the Church of St. Peter’s Abbey, Salzburg on Sunday, 26^th October,1783, Constanze sang the beautiful “Et incarnatus est”. 

The work is incomplete, missing all the Credo movements following the aria Et incarnatus est and all of the Agnus Dei. There is a good deal of speculation concerning why the work was left unfinished. 

The Five Mystical Songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), was written between 1906 and 1911. The work is set to four poems by seventeenth-century Welsh poet and Anglican priest George Herbert.  While Herbert was a priest, Vaughan Williams himself was an atheist at the time (he later settled into a “cheerful agnosticism”), though this did not prevent his setting of verse of an overtly religious inspiration. The work premiered on 14 September 1911, at the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester, with Vaughan Williams himself conducting. It is written for one Baritone soloist.

The concert will take place at 7.00pm in St George’s Cathedral.