Composer: Clive Osgood
Choir: The Choir of Royal Holloway
Orchestra: London Mozart Players
Director: Rupert Gough
This setting of the Stabat Mater, a 13th century
hymn to the Virgin Mary, is written for soprano,
tenor and bass soloists as well as chorus, strings
and piano. The work was composed in 2009 and
divides the original twenty stanzas of the text
into ten movements. It describes the grief-stricken
Mother of Jesus standing at the foot of cross,
on which he is suffering an agonising death.
The overall shape of these movements
provides something of an arch structure,
with similar music at the beginning and end.
Similarly, a slower variation of the second
movement is used for the penultimate movement.
