Choral Works by Vaughan Williams, Holst on April 18
By • March 26, 2026 0 408
Not counting an appearance in late May at Carnegie Hall, the Choral Arts Society of Washington will close out its 2025-26 season with a mid-April performance of two works by esteemed British composers: Gustav Holst — whose suite “The Planets” regularly orbits onto symphony programs — and Ralph (rhymes with “safe”) Vaughan Williams.
Titled “From Darkness to Light,” the concert will take place on Saturday, April 18, at Northern Virginia Community College’s Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall in Alexandria. Tickets are $30 to $70.
Close friends, Vaughan Williams and Holst, two years younger, were fellow students at the Royal College of Music. Vaughan Williams also studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and briefly with Max Bruch in Berlin and Maurice Ravel in Paris. He outlived Holst by two decades, completing nine symphonies and five operas before his death in 1958 at age 85.
The Holst piece to be performed, “Two Psalms” of 1912, sets Psalm 86, “To my humble supplication,” and Psalm 148, “Lord, who has made us for Thine own.”
Vaughan Williams will be represented by his six-movement cantata, “Dona Nobis Pacem.” For the text of this 1936 work — an antiwar statement for chorus, orchestra and vocal soloists — he drew not only from the Latin Mass, the Old Testament and a Victorian-era speech in the House of Commons, but from poetry by an American, Walt Whitman.
The three Whitman poems, heard in the second, third and fourth movements, are from “Drum-Taps,” initially printed in April of 1865, the month of Lee’s surrender to Grant and Lincoln’s assassination. Having witnessed the Civil War’s carnage in Virginia, where he tracked down his wounded brother George in 1862, the middle-aged poet spent the next three years visiting makeshift hospitals in Washington, D.C.
Latin for “Grant us peace,” “Dona nobis pacem” is part of the Mass Ordinary’s final chant, Agnus Dei (Lamb of God). With soprano Amy Broadbent as soloist, Agnus Dei is the first movement of Vaughan Williams’s cantata, segueing to his second-movement setting, expansively orchestrated with percussion and brass, of Whitman’s “Beat! Beat! Drums!” (“Beat! beat! drums! – blow! bugles! blow!/Through the windows – through the doors – burst like a ruthless force,/Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation”).
Next come poignant settings of the Whitman poems “Reconciliation” (“For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead”) and “Dirge for Two Veterans” (“Two veterans, son and father, dropped together,/And the double grave awaits them”).
In the fifth movement, bass-baritone soloist Edmund Milly will sing the “Angel of Death” excerpt from an 1855 speech condemning the Crimean War by Radical (later Liberal and Liberal Unionist) Member of Parliament John Bright. The strings introduce Old Testament passages in the sixth movement, with the chorus building to full force, then dropping in volume for Broadbent to deliver the final, hopeful “Dona nobis pacem.”
In creating the work, commissioned for the centenary of the Huddersfield Choral Society (still singing in West Yorkshire), Vaughan Williams began with an unfinished setting of “Dirge for Two Veterans” that he composed in 1911. The cantata’s drama and power reflect another inspiration, the Verdi Requiem, along with Vaughan Williams’s ambulance service in World War I — perhaps he again thought of Whitman — and his trepidation at the rise of Fascism in 1930s Spain, Italy and Germany.
Choral Arts last performed “Dona Nobis Pacem” in 2009.
“This will be the first time for me conducting the work,” said Artistic Director Marie Bucoy-Calavan. “I have watched it many times and have been a fan of the profundity of the work. I sang it as a sophomore during my undergrad, and the fourth movement speaking about a son and father dying together in war stuck with me.”
The Choral Arts Symphonic Chorus of some 140 singers will be joined by the Choral Arts Orchestra and organist Matthew Steynor, since 2019 director of music at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, Choral Arts’ home base. Allan Palacios Chan, the third guest vocalist, will sing the tenor solo in the two-part Holst piece for choir, organ and strings, which lasts about 15 minutes, a bit less than half the length of “Dona Nobis Pacem.”
Also appearing, but not singing: Peter Loge, founding director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication at George Washington University, where he is associate professor of media and public affairs. The concert’s subtitle is “An Interactive Choral Discussion,” and Loge is the designated facilitator.
“My hope is that Choral Arts can invite audiences to experience not just a performance, but a catalyst for much-needed conversation,” said Dr. Bucoy-Calavan, who became the 61-year-old symphonic chorus’s fourth artistic director in 2024.
“In a fractured and polarized world, Vaughan Williams’s ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’ becomes the starting point for a live, facilitated dialogue during an extended intermission, led by GWU’s Peter Loge, inviting audiences to reflect together on division, dialogue and our shared civic responsibility,” she explained. “It’s a rare opportunity not only to hear the music, but to engage with it — and with one another — in real time.”
From Darkness to Light: An Interactive Choral Discussion
The Choral Arts Society of Washington
Saturday, April 18, at 5 p.m.
Schlesinger Concert Hall, 4915 East Campus Drive, Alexandria
