BBC Singers 2026-27 Songs of Farewell

The BBC Singers, conducted by Krista Audere, perform Parry’s Songs of Farewell, his profoundly moving cycle of wartime laments for a lost age. Confronted by both the devastation of the First World War and by his own declining health, Parry poured his response into six luminous choral motets steeped in nostalgia and grief, and widely regarded as some of the most powerful music he ever wrote.

The first half of the concert looks to renewal and the natural world, pairing Caroline Shaw’s Companion Planting with one of Palestrina’s earliest works, his radiant Missa Sicut lilium inter spinas.