Mass of the Children

The FCS Symphonic Chorus, Master Singers, and Concert Choir will join other participating choirs to perform John Rutter’s Mass of the Children at Carnegie Hall.

John Rutter had wanted to write this piece for a long time. As a boy he had sung the children’s parts in Britten and Mahler, and he never forgot what it felt like to be a young singer folded into something enormous. Mass of the Children was his way of repaying that.

He finished it in early 2003, and it was first performed at Carnegie Hall in February of that year with the composer conducting. It is a missa brevis — the Latin Mass without the Credo — but Rutter threaded English poetry through it, opening with Bishop Thomas Ken’s morning hymn and closing with his evening one, so that the whole work has the shape of a single day: you wake up inside it and you go to sleep inside it. Everything in between arrives the way events arrive in a life.

He had also, two years earlier, lost his son Christopher, a nineteen-year-old choral scholar at Cambridge. The piece never says so directly. Rather Rutter sets the children’s voices as the center, and the adult chorus sings around and beneath them.

Which is why this is the right ending for our 65th season, and why we are taking it to New York. Fairfax Choral Society has been an organization of adult singers and young singers under one roof since 1962. On May 29, 2027, our Symphonic Chorus, Master Singers, and Concert Choir will sing this music together on the stage where it was first heard.

Come with us.

Ticketing Information
Tickets for this performance will be sold separately by the event’s presenter or authorized ticketing provider and will not be sold through FCS. The seller’s terms, fees, refund and exchange policies, and event policies will apply. Ticket information will be added when it becomes available.