Luminos Ensemble
Luminos Chamber Orchestra

Dr. Margot Rejskind, artistic director & conductor

Luminos Ensemble

​

Soprano
Hannah Aitken, Georgia Edwards,
Rebecca Hulme, Evelyn McEwen

Alto
Kassinda Bulgur, Annette Campbell,
Marlee Saulnier, Wendy Wade-Maxwell

Tenor
Darin MacBeth, Troy Martin,
Justin Simard, Luke Thompson

Bass
Dan Aitken, Jordan MacLean,
Brodie MacRae, Gaige Waugh

 

Luminos Chamber Orchestra
Madeline Kapp MacDonald & Olasunkanmi Omotosho, violin
Jeffrey Bazett-Jones, viola  Natalie Williams Calhoun, cello  Adam Hill, bass
Leo Marchildon, keyboard
 

Laura MacLeod, trumpet
 

Grant Us Peace
Saturday November 9, 2024

Find The Cost of Freedom
Crosby, Stills, & Nash

In Flanders Fields
Cristine Donkin

Last To Leave
Richard Oswin

For The Fallen
Mike Sammes

Dona Nobis Pacem
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Georgia Edwards, soprano
Gaige Waugh, baritone

i. Agnus Dei
ii. Beat! Beat! Drums!
iii. Reconciliation
iv. Dirge for Two Veterans
v. The Angel of Death
vi. O Man, Greatly Beloved

Last Post
Minute of Silence


Major Donor:
Gillian Bramwell

 

We are pleased to acknowledge the support of Veterans Affairs Canada for this performance.

We acknowledge that we live and make music in Epekwitk, which is located in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People. We honour the “Treaties of Peace and Friendship” which recognized Mi’kmaq title and established an ongoing relationship between nations.
We are all Treaty People.

​

​

Dona Nobis Pacem (Grant Us Peace) - Ralph Vaughan Williams (England 1872-1958)
The cantata Dona Nobis Pacem by Ralph Vaughan Williams was written at a time when the country was slowly awakening to the possibility of a second European conflict. When invited to provide a work for the centenary of the Huddersfield Choral Society in October 1936, Vaughan Williams reached immediately for Walt Whitman’s ‘Dirge for Two Veterans’, taken from Whitman’s 1865 collection Drum Taps inspired by the American Civil War. Vaughan Williams had set it to music in 1911 before the First World War, and now resurrected it as the centrepiece of this new work, preceding it with two further poems by Whitman, also from Drum Taps: ‘Beat! Beat! Drums!’ and ‘Reconciliation’. He prefaced this group of Whitman poems with a setting of the words of the Agnus Dei of the Latin Mass, and followed it with a passage from a speech given in Parliament by John Bright in 1855 at the time of the Crimean War. (‘The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings …’. ) Vaughan Williams claimed to be the only composer ever to have set a passage from the proceedings of the House of Commons! In the last two sections he used a series of passages drawn from the Old Testament which together express optimism for future peace. The text is rounded off with the verse from St Luke ‘Glory to God in the Highest and on earth peace, Good will towards men’ and a final repetition of the plea ‘Grant us peace’ in the work’s title.

The whole work is welded together by the composer’s sense of urgency; as Simon Heffer, Vaughan Williams’ biographer, has said of Dona Nobis Pacem, his ‘main inspiration is drawn not from the soil of England, but from the whole world going mad around him’. The music for the words from Micah (‘nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more …’), and thereafter, becomes more optimistic, a foreshadowing of the last movement Passacaglia of the future Fifth Symphony; but, unlike the later work, here the music returns to a state of hesitant prayer sung ppp by the chorus and solo soprano, a prayer that at the time was not to be granted.

Dona Nobis Pacem was performed many times in that anxious period leading up to the Second World War, and it remains popular and relevant today. The work reminds us that war inevitably brings misery and loss. Vaughan Williams knew that as well as anyone yet at the same time he was convinced that, given the circumstances, this war needed to be fought.