St Andrew's Church, Burgess Hill

Sussex Chorus will be singing two pieces essentially about peace in their autumn concert.

Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem sound very different but address the same themes.

You can hear them on November 7 at 7.30pm at St Andrew's Church, Burgess Hill, RH15 OLG.

Bernstein had composed the music for West Side Story eight years before he wrote the Psalms. When the Dean of Chichester Cathedral, the Very Rev Walter Hussey, asked him if he could write something for the cathedral’s music festival in 1965, he wrote to the composer: “I think many of us would be very delighted if there was a hint of West Side Story about the music.” He cannot have been disappointed.

“I keep thinking I’m hearing Maria”, says Sussex Chorus’s conductor Stephen Anthony Brown. “The Chichester Psalms are energetic and rhythmically vital as they ask why there is so much war, but also, in their hope for peace, breathtakingly serene.

“Bernstein’s use of the original Hebrew texts of the psalms makes his message more poignant, especially in the middle movement when a boy soprano, as David on the hillside, sings The Lord’s my Shepherd – only to be interrupted by the famous psalm asking Why do the nations rage? The piece finishes with a lullaby to peace, with the popular musical left behind. In the last movement the piece doesn't really have any feeling of West Side Story. It actually feels like a sort of Hebrew prayer.”

The ever-popular Requiem by Fauré has also been called a lullaby of death. In the composer’s own words: “It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance rather than a painful experience.”

As a church organist, Fauré had played for many funerals and knew the requiem mass by heart. Of his Requiem, he said, “I wanted to write something different.”

His faith was less doctrinal than a gentle spirituality. He was not strongly observant and was known to slip out from the sermon sometimes to have a cigarette. Composed in the late 1880s, the Requiem was played at his own funeral in 1924.

The two pieces also share the purity of a boy soprano: David in the Psalms, and the Pie Jesu (merciful Jesus) movement of the Requiem. “There are a lot of mirrors between them”, says Stephen, “and they work very well together.”

The concert will feature the Kent Sinfonia and the baritone James Cleverton.

Tickets are £18 for adults, £16 each for groups of four or more and £6 for students in full-time education. Each ticket price includes a programme. They are available from Sussex Chorus (01444 412579), from Burgess Hill Help Point, Eventbrite.co.uk or on the door.