PSALMS | ORGAN | SONGS

Exulting Choral & Organ Recital on first organ entirely built in KZN.
The Pietermaritzburg Amateur Music Society is celebrating the rejuvenated organ in the St George’s Garrison Church. Well-known Pietermaritzburg-born organist Christopher Cockburn will perform a selection of organ-music to reveal the range and capabilities of this lovely old instrument.As prelude and postlude, PAMS choir will perform a selection of sacred and secular music.

The Book of Psalms in the Bible is a collection of powerfully expressive poetry covering a wide range of emotions and conditions, and over the ages composers have set many of them to music. One of the best-known psalms is Psalm 23, with its words of fervent hope, and we begin with three very contrasting settings of this psalm: firstly the hymn “Crimond” (named after the Scottish village in which it was written), followed by settings by Franz Schubert and then by Howard Goodall, who composed his setting for the BBC TV series “The Vicar of Dibley”. Then from Johannes Brahms’ Requiem, “How lovely are Thy dwellings” from his German Requiem.

After the organ recital two secular pieces: Ronald Binge’s charming “Elizabethan Serenade,” and then an arrangement of the British folksong “Waly Waly”, with its heart-rending text on the waning of love – Waly meaning “Woe is me!” Finally we include the organ once more in a setting of Psalm 130 by the nineteenth-century composer British composer Dudley Buck, that passes from heartfelt yearning to positive affirmation.