As featured on the best-selling disc, this is a powerful and compelling account of the descent into and terrible consequences of war. Commissioned for the millennium by the Royal Armouries and dedicated to the victims of the Kosovo crisis, this work is a contemporary example of a mass based on the 15th-century French song L’Homme Armé (The Armed Man). The complete work sets sacred and secular texts including Tennyson, Kipling, The Koran and the Hindu Mahàbharàta within the framework of the Christian mass.
This suite of five mass movements and the Hymn Before Action arranged for SATB chorus and piano/organ is suitable as a concert item or within a liturgical setting and will make a stunning contemporary mass alternative.
Britten's pacifist masterwork, combining war poetry by Wilfred Owen with the Latin Requiem Mass, is included in the Masterworks Library of full scores, ideal for conductors, students and music lovers.
