It’s always amazing and exciting when a new composition by a significant composer from an earlier generation is discovered and heard for the first time. The Fairfax Choral Society had the privilege of presenting the Washington-area premieres of two newly-discovered works when we presented Felix Mendelssohn’s Magnificat in 1995 and George Frederic Handel’s Gloria in 2001.
Ralph Vaughan Williams believed that music should speak for itself and that it should not require lengthy explanations or extensive program notes. “The duty of words,” he explained, “is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid, no more.”
