Said service according to the Book of Common Prayer

Said service according to the Book of Common Prayer

Please enter the Temple via Tudor Street.

Sung by the Temple Singers

Organ prelude: Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (Buxtehude)
Introit: Never weather beaten sail (Shepherd) 
Responses: (Smith) 
Psalm 44 
First canticle: Benedicite (Sumsion in B flat) 
Second canticle: Canticle of Zechariah (MacMillan)
Anthem: Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (Altenburg)
Organ voluntary: Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland BWV661 (Bach)

Schubert: Winterreise
Mark Padmore tenor
Julius Drake piano
Our Winter Festival opens with this epic tale of lost love and despair. Rejected by his beloved, the protagonist sets out on a brutally icy and lonely journey, with only the snow, the bare trees and the occasional crow to keep him company. A gradual descent into madness ensues, depicted in some of Schubert’s most devastatingly beautiful music. Schubert himself was dying when he wrote this bleak and powerful cycle, described by Ian Bostridge as ‘an indispensable work of art that should be as much a part of our common experience as the poetry of Shakespeare and Dante, the paintings of Van Gogh and Picasso, the novels of the Brontë sisters or Marcel Proust.’

Duration: approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes (no interval)

View seating plan
Venue: Temple Church
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"I was awed in following the German texts to register how immaculate and internalised was his honouring of the text and how delicate his inflection of every syllable"

The Daily Telegraph - on Mark Padmore
"The piano felt like a whole orchestra, descriptive and evocative; Drake’s magisterial command of tonal inflections allowing him to invest Schubert’s transitions from minor to major mode and major to minor with acute emotional point"

The Guardian

ADVENT: FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT

‘God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years … And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night … And God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.’

Music by Byrd, Gibbons, Grieg, MacMillan and Tavener