Program features the complete choral works of Maurice Duruflé

By Peter Alexander

If Monet’s paintings were music, they would be the choral works of Maurice Duruflé.

That’s the view of Thomas Edward Morgan, director of Boulder’s Ars Nova Singers, who open their season Oct. 6 and 7 in Denver and Boulder with an all-Duruflé program, featuring the composer’s entire output for chorus.

Thomas Edward Morgan and Ars Nova Singers. Photo by Julie Afflerbaugh.

“Our mailing for this [concert] used a Monet painting of Rouen Cathedral,” Morgan says. “Duruflé was a choir boy at that cathedral, and [his music] is as close as we get in the musical world to how Monet was seeing the world.”

Maurice Duruflé

Duruflé’s name is probably better known to choral singers than to the general public, largely because his music is very rewarding to sing, but there’s not very much of it. “He was a perfectionist,” Morgan says. “He didn’t release very much material, but all of what he did is just extremely well crafted, and a joy to do.”

The anchor of the program will be Duruflé’s best known work, his Requiem, composed in the 1940s. The other choral works on the program are a set of four motets, composed in 1950; the Cum jubilo Mass of 1960, for male choir and organ; and Notre Père (Our Father), an a capella work composed in 1977.

Read more in Boulder Weekly.

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Maurice Duruflé: The Complete Choral Works

Ars Nova Singers, Thomas Edward Morgan, artistic director
Joyce Kull and Brian du Fresne, organ
7:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 7, St. John’s Episcopal Church, Boulder

Tickets