On Monday 18 August a live performance took place of Delius’s ‘A Mass of Life’ at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms which was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. Those taking part were:
Jennifer Davis (soprano)
Claudia Huckle (contralto)
David Butt Philip (tenor)
Roderick Williams (baritone)
BBC Symphony Orchestra & Chorus
London Philharmonic Choir
Sir Mark Elder (conductor)
During the interval, the writer and musicologist Daniel Grimley joined Martin Handley to discuss the genesis of Delius’s musical response to the prose of the great German philosopher Nietzsche.
‘No other English composer offers more beauty in sound,’ Thomas Beecham said of Delius. There’s no more extravagant, impassioned or overwhelming a canvas for that beauty than ‘A Mass of Life’. Taking Nietzsche’s rapturous prose-poem ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ as a starting point, Delius imagined a secular Mass – a cantata for orchestra, chorus and soloists celebrating the transcendent power and triumph of the human spirit in the face of death.
Photo, from the performance, by Chris Christodoulou