A Journey – Pretty Yende

   in Choir & Organ (Sep, 2012)
Lazarus Requiem is the latest in a series of large-scale Christian-inspired choral works by Hawes. It’s also something of a textual and musical oddity, combining the words of the Requiem Mass with original text and Gospel adaptations by Hawes’s brother Andrew, a priest.

This two-track narrative is reflected in the work’s musical shape, which intersperses the Latin rite with a series of pictorial tableaux of the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead. It’s a structure that doesn’t always convince. But what the Lazarus Requiem does do – and to striking effect – is bring into sharp relief Hawes’s unerring gift for evocative orchestral texture and beautiful melodic line. In …