Description
At the core of Richard Blackford’s Pietà is a setting of the Stabat Mater; but it also includes two poignant poems by the celebrated Russian Anna Akhmatova from Requiem. The poems echo the words in Stabat Mater reflecting the grief of a mother for her son. Her struggle is immortalised in ‘Requiem’, her most famous work. Alternating between elegy, lamentation and witness. When the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus studied the work for the first time, conductor Gavin Carr wrote: ‘It is so compact, and so powerful: the intensity is incredible, and the release at the end is remarkable.’