As a part of All Saints’ Day worship this year, the Sanctuary Choir, guest instrumentalists, and soloists sang John Rutter’s Requiem. On this day that mingles loss with hope, this work moves musically and textually from pain to comfort and from darkness to light. First premiering in Dallas in 1985, the Rutter Requiem has held deep significance in the last forty years of liturgical and musical history because unlike other requiems, as Rutter put it, the work “is intimate rather than grand, contemplative and lyric rather than dramatic, consolatory rather than grim, approachable rather than exclusive. I suppose that some will find the sense of comfort and consolation in it facile, but it was what I meant at the time I wrote it, in the shadow of a bereavement of my own.”
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