Woking Choral Society opens its 2001 – 2002 singing season with a duo – Bruckner’s F Minor Mass and Händel’s Dixit Dominus, two famous works by two famous composers.

The F minor mass by the great Austrian composer Anton Bruckner is one of the three masses he wrote between 1864 and 1868 and which form the climax of his years as a composer before he moved to Vienna and devoted himself to composing symphonies. Bruckner’s early musical training was all undertaken while in the service of the Catholic church, first as a chorister and later deputy organist at the ancient monastery of St. Florian in Upper Austria, and then as organist of the cathedral in the Austrian town of Linz. Bruckner himself came from a line of village schoolmasters who had lived in the vicinity of Linz for centuries. Only 12 years old when his father died Bruckner too became a schoolmaster, not achieving his long ambition of a full-time musical career until he obtained the Linz post at the age of 31.

The demands of his teaching jobs and the fact that compositional studies had to be fitted into his spare time no doubt account, at least in part, for Bruckner’s slow maturing as a composer. before he moved to Vienna. The F minor mass was written last and is the largest in scale. It is symphonic in conception and unlike the others seems clearly designed for concert rather than liturgical performance, though requiring the great spaces of a cathedral to make its full effect. In the summer of 1867 Bruckner suffered a severe depression and nervous collapse, brought on by overwork, self-doubts relating to his failure to gain recognition as an artist, and (not least) rejection in love (a misfortune he was unhappily prone to encounter throughout his life). Sustained as always by his deep religious faith he made a full recovery, and began the F minor in November of that year. It was completed in 1868 and first performed in Vienna under his own baton in 1872.

Dixit Dominus by G.F. Händel is a setting of the Latin text of Psalm 110. It was written in Italy in 1707 when Händel was only 22, and employed as a household musician by the Marquis (later Prince) Francesco Ruspoli. Most probably Dixit Dominus, along with his two other major church works of the Italian years, Laudate Pueri and Nisi Dominus, formed part of a complete setting of the Carmelite Vespers for the feast of the Madonna del Carmine on 16 July 1707.

Dixit is a work of quite astonishing bravura and power. In it Händel seems to be glorying in his new-found mastery of every facet of compositional technique: contrapuntal skill, melodic invention, deployment of harmony for dramatic effect (cf "Juravit Dominus") and the creation of great edifices of musical architecture.

Scored for five-part choir and five-part string orchestra, the voices are tested to limits rarely found in his later choral music. Every one of its nine movements is on the highest level and it represents not only one of Händel’s very best works but an undoubted pinnacle of the whole choral repertoire.