The BBC Singers, Abel Selaocoe

Abel Selaocoe joins the BBC Singers for Gubaidulina’s spiritual tour de force, the Canticle of the Sun. Written for Rostropovich, her radiantly mystical setting of the St Francis’s prayer to the natural world glories in creation, the sun, moon, the elements, life and death, and was partly a response to the flowering of religious practice after the collapse of the USSR. The evening begins with Grechaninov’s (1864-1956) serenely profound Vespers, written just before the Russian Revolution.