Hymn to the Fallen

The “great” fantasia and fugue in G minor, associated with Bach's visit to Hamburg in 1720 — the same visit during which he improvised for half an hour on the chorale “An Wasserflüssen Babylon”, and the aged Reincken is said to have remarked that he had thought this art already dead. The fantasia is almost operatic: recitative, suspensions, a chromaticism with no floor to it. Krzysztof Michałek played it as the entrance music, before the first word of the evening was spoken; the rivers of Babylon will return here shortly, in Palestrina.

Rutter wrote it in the first weeks after the Russian invasion of 2022 and made it available to choirs free of charge, asking in return for support for the victims of the war. The text is Oleksandr Konysky's “Prayer for Ukraine”, which Mykola Lysenko set in 1885; it is sung to this day as Ukraine's spiritual anthem. The first word of this evening is therefore a plea in the language of those it prays for.

The great litany opens the Orthodox Divine Liturgy; it is also called the litany of peace, because the deacon's first petitions are for the peace from on high and for the peace of the whole world. The choir answers them with two sentences only. Rachmaninov wrote his Liturgy of St John Chrysostom in 1910 in under three weeks. It was his first church work; seven years later he left Russia for good. That evening his petition for the peace of the whole world sounded immediately after the prayer for Ukraine.

A motet for four voices published in 1581. Psalm 137, the song of the exiles who laid music aside by the rivers of Babylon: they hung their instruments on the willows, because they could not sing the Lord's song in a strange land. Palestrina leads the four voices with complete calm; the mourning here is in what has fallen silent.

An organ setting of the chorale on the melody the world now knows as the Passion chorale, “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden”, the one Bach called upon five times in the St Matthew Passion. The chorale text is itself a paraphrase of Psalm 6, the first of the penitential psalms, in which the soul asks outright: how long? Here there were no words. Michał Piechnik played them on the organ; anyone who knows the melody heard them.

Pärt wrote it to a commission from the Irish Louth Contemporary Music Society. The text is a fragment of “The Breastplate of St Patrick”, the prayer the saint is said to have recited as he went to convert the king of Tara; the king's men then saw, instead of travellers, a herd of deer — hence the second name: the deer's cry. It is a prayer of protection: Christ places himself on every side of the one who speaks. Pärt, in his tintinnabuli, repeats it the way a prayer one genuinely needs is repeated.

The same hymn that sounded in “The Call of the Mountains”: the last two stanzas of St Thomas Aquinas's Verbum supernum prodiens, sung at the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. Here, though, something else is audible in it: “bella premunt hostilia, da robur, fer auxilium” — the fierce battle presses upon thy faithful, give strength, send help. A thirteenth-century eucharistic hymn speaks of war outright; it is the only text of the evening the ensemble printed in the programme in full.

Tavener wrote it after the death of Athene Hariades, a young actress and a friend of the family, who was killed in a cycling accident. The text was assembled by Mother Thekla, an Orthodox nun and for many years the composer's collaborator: she interweaves Horatio's words from “Hamlet” — “may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” — with the Orthodox funeral service. Beneath the choir a motionless drone of basses runs throughout: the ison. The world heard the piece in 1997, when the coffin of Diana, Princess of Wales, was carried out of Westminster Abbey to its sound.

From the score of Steven Spielberg's “Saving Private Ryan”. The choir does not sing a single word in it: pure vocalise. Williams wrote it not for a particular scene but as a hymn for the fallen. Without names and without a language, and so without borders. The evening took its name from this piece.

The melody comes from the finale of the tone poem Finlandia, which Sibelius wrote in 1899, when tsarist Russia curtailed Finland's autonomy and imposed censorship on the Finnish press. The piece was then performed under invented titles to get round the ban; it became the song of resistance of a nation that did not yet have a state. Katharina von Schlegel's hymn of 1752, in Jane Borthwick's English translation, was later fitted to that melody: be still, my soul. So at a concert for Ukraine's fallen, a Finnish melody of freedom sounded to words of consolation.

The fourth and only solo movement of Fauré's Requiem, written for a boy's voice. Across his whole requiem Fauré gave up the Dies irae sequence, which in other settings takes up the most room: there is no judgement here and no terror. The work has been called a “lullaby of death”; the composer did not argue, that was how he saw death. The text is two sentences: have mercy, and grant them rest.

Nimrod is the ninth of the Enigma Variations: a portrait of August Jaeger, the publisher and friend who, at a moment of doubt, persuaded Elgar not to stop writing. Jäger is German for “hunter”, and Nimrod was the hunter of the Bible: hence the name. Britain plays this music over graves, every year at the Cenotaph in London on Remembrance Sunday. John Cameron set the communion of the Requiem Mass beneath it: light eternal.

The anthem of Ukraine: words by Pavlo Chubynsky of 1862, melody by Fr Mykhailo Verbytsky, a Greek Catholic priest — “Ukraine has not yet perished, nor her glory, nor her freedom”. The titular organist of St Mary's Basilica improvised on the theme with the altarpiece already open. From the tower of the same church a trumpet call is played every hour, breaking off mid-note in memory of an invasion.