Vancouver Cantata Singers’ In Paradisum reaches for transcendence, November 1

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G minor joins other works that search for spiritual heights

By Janet Smith

Vancouver Cantata Singers

Vancouver Cantata Singers present In Paradisum at Pacific Spirit United Church on November 1 at 7:30 pm

WRITTEN IN 1921, British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G minor was profoundly influenced by the war that had just ended. During the First World War, the artist had volunteered for the Royal Army Medical Corps and served as a wagon orderly—a harrowing position that required him to recover bodies from the battlefield trenches.

Though a professed agnostic, he started to explore the spiritual realm—a sort of “paradise” that might transcend these earthly horrors. And so it makes sense that the Vancouver Cantata Singers’ In Paradisum, the first concert of the 2025-26 season, should centre around the profound a cappella choral work for double choir and four soloists.

Rich with modal harmonies and polyphonic textures, the Mass is inspired by old English Tudor church music. The work, dedicated to Williams’s close friend and musical confidant Gustav Holst, ends up achieving spiritual heights.

On the program under music director Paula Kremer, the famous piece joins outstanding 20th-century Estonian choral composer Veljo Tormis’s Raua needmine (Curse Upon Iron)—a hypnotic work also inspired by the destruction of war; it draws on ancient Finnish Kalevala incantations, contemporary poems, and a shamanistic ritual to curse iron. Elsewhere, more recent pieces include American composer Eric Whitacre’s glistening Nox Aurumque (“Night and Gold”), and Christine Donkin’s In Paradisum, whose thrilling mid-section conveys the arrival in paradise and its chorus of angels.

In other words, it’s a mix that should be heaven for choral lovers.  

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