This concert features the world premiere performance of Roxanna Panufnik’s Agnus Dei cum jubilo, commissioned by NIIOC with funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s National Lottery Programme.
Free entry with retiring collection
Richard Yarr MBE DL, Chairman of NIIOC, said: ‘Andrew was the winner of our competition in 2014, and the St Alban’s International Organ Festival is our partner festival, so this performance will tie some of our connections together nicely. It’s a very exciting moment for us to premiere our second commission, by another wonderful woman composer, following Where the Birds Sing by Grace-Evangeline Mason, commissioned for our tenth anniversary in 2022 by the Commission for Victims and Survivors and premiered by our 2013 competition winner Richard Gowers.
Roxanna Panufnik will be present at the Belfast recital, which is part of First Church’s Music in May series and will be given on the church’s highly regarded Lewis organ. Commenting on the commission, the composer said: ‘Ever since composing Kyrie cum Jubilo 13 years ago, I’ve longed to complete a mass for solo organ. I’m so excited and grateful to Richard Yarr and NIIOC and organist Andrew Forbes, who have enabled me to complete my mass, starting in Belfast in May and finishing in Glasgow in September.’
‘Each movement of the Mass is based on a plainsong melody from a 12th-century Mass “In solemnities and feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary”, also known as “Cum jubilo”. In the Agnus Dei, sometimes the plainsong is implied as the top line of shifting harmonies or it becomes a high, “celestial” accompaniment to something else. There are references to the other movements in my Mass (although I’ve yet to compose the Sanctus & Benedictus!) especially in the last “have mercy on us”, where the scalic passages of my Kyrie Cum Jubilo take on modes from Japan, India, Turkey and Greece to form a global quest for mercy and then peace.’
Programme:
Fiesta!
Emma Lou Diemer (1927–2024)
Scottish Legend, Op.54
Amy Beach (1867–1944), arr. Gower
For the love of a Princess (Braveheart)
James Horner (1953–2015) arr. Forbes
Concert Fantasia in B flat
Albert Lister Peace (1844–1912)
Claire de Lune (Suite Bergamasque)
Claude Debussy (1862–1918) arr. Machella
Where the Birds Sing [NIIOC commission]
Grace-Evangeline Mason (b.1994)
Here Comes the Sun
George Harrison (1943–2001) arr. Forbes
Those Americans
Calvin Hampton (1938–1984)
Hymn (from Flights of Fancy: Ballet for Organ)
William Albright (1944–1998)
Missa cum Jubilo
- Kyrie
- Agnus Dei [first performance]
Roxanna Panufnik (b.1968)
Toccata in G
Théodore Dubois (1837–1924)