The doleful sound of a ship’s horn introduced Requiem for the Lost Souls of the Titanic at St Anne’s in Belfast on Saturday evening.
News letter report –
Jarring brass depicted the crashing of the waves and lent a sense of foreboding inside the Church of Ireland Cathedral in the city where the liner was built.
A meditation read by local novelist Glenn Patterson spoke of the sense of loss and put words into the victims’ mouths, observing that they missed weddings and birthdays, the First World War trenches and Elvis, emphasising the time elapsed in this centenary year.
“We passed instead into myth, launched a library full of books, enough film to cross the Atlantic three times over, more conspiracy theories than Kennedy, 97 million web pages, a tourist industry, a requiem or two,” Mr Patterson said.
“We will live longer than every one of you.”
The composition by Belfast composer Philip Hammond included the Downshire Brass Band and Belfast Philharmonic.
His work featured male chorists dressed as cabin crew, in dark-blue waistcoats and white shirts and carrying candles. Women, covered head to foot in black, stepping delicately and slowly, also bore flames to the dead while a group of children, who could have been cabin boys draped in purple with black capes tied at the neck, filed into the atrium of the imposing grey stone-colonnaded cathedral.
Mr Hammond said in a programme note: “This setting is dedicated to two people, one who died very old and one who died very young. Within my own experience, they mirrored the huge range of people who lost their lives as a result of the Titanic disaster.”
The meditations focused on the imagined experiences of the victims.
“That first plunge, as stunningly cold as a face in the basin on a winter’s morning, whisking breath away.”
Mr Patterson also envisaged the radio operator, calling for help as his windowless Marconi wireless room was filled with water, the sudden loneliness of his death.
More at –
http://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/local/requiem-for-titanic-victims-1-3736354