Sussex Chorus perform works by Mozart and Howard Blake

Tickets are £18 for adults (including a programme); £16 for groups of four or more; and £6 for students in full-time education. They are available from 01444 412579, Burgess Hill Help Point, Eventbrite or on the door.

A spokesman said: “The Requiem is one of the most beloved and moving pieces of all classical choral music. It carries extra emotional weight because Mozart died before he finished it. It was completed by his colleague, the Austrian composer Franz Xaver Süssmayr. According to Mozart’s wife Constanze, Mozart came to believe he was writing it for his own funeral. In fact it had been commissioned by Count Franz von Walsegg to commemorate his young wife. Walsegg probably hoped to pass the work off as his own as he had done with other pieces, but a public performance in aid of Constanze after Mozart’s death put paid to any such plan.

“The Requiem will be performed with a piece orchestrated to accompany it by the celebrated composer Howard Blake, best known for The Snowman. He wrote The Song of St Francis especially for the choir while based at Highbridge Mill, near Cuckfield. On a holiday in the Middle East, he walked above the Dead Sea one very hot day. He suddenly remembered the Cancticle of our Brother Sun by Saint Francis of Assisi, held to be the first significant poem in the Italian language. It praises God as revealed in nature: in brothers sun, wind, air and fire, sisters moon, water and death, and mother Earth. St Francis’s delight in the natural world overflows in joyous celebration.”

Stephen Anthony Brown will conduct the choir with soloists Zita Syme (soprano), Angharad Lyddon (mezzo soprano), Alex Aldren (tenor) and Florian Bonneau (bass), accompanied by the Kent Sinfonia.