Mozart Requiem (Duncan Druce Completion)

Kāpiti Chorale and Capital Choir join forces with orchestra and soloists for a powerful performance of Mozart's final masterpiece.

When Mozart died in 1791 at the age of 35, he left the Requiem unfinished. Within months, his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr completed the work on behalf of Mozart's widow Constanze. His version became one of the most famous and beloved works in the choral repertoire and remains the version most often performed today.

Yet Mozart's surviving sketches continued to raise questions. For more than 200 years, composers and scholars have revisited them, searching for clues to how Mozart himself intended to complete the work.

This concert presents one of the most fascinating answers to that question: the Duncan Druce completion. Created in 1984 by the English composer, performer and musicologist Duncan Druce, it draws on Mozart's surviving manuscript while revisiting parts of the traditional completion. The result offers a fresh perspective on one of the defining works of the classical repertoire.

This special collaboration brings together the combined forces of Kāpiti Chorale and Capital Choir, four outstanding soloists and orchestra for two performances: Saturday 28 November at Te Raukura Performing Arts Centre, Paraparaumu, and Saturday 5 December at the Riley Centre, Wellington High School.

The programme opens with a diverse selection of choral music, including works by Mozart, Salieri, Haydn, Princess Te Rangi Pai and William Dawson, before culminating in Mozart's Requiem.

Soloists

Barbara Paterson, soprano

Ruth Armishaw, alto

Richard Taylor, tenor

Joseph Haddow, bass

This collaboration will be presented in both Kāpiti and Wellington.

Duration: Approximately 2 hours including interval.