Organist David Briggs will play at Christ’s Church this Sunday, November 20th. He will accompany the adult choir and choristers at the 10am service of Morning Prayer and perform an organ concert at 5pm. It is the second year Briggs has performed at Christ’s Church.
In the morning, the choirs will sing together the Magnificat from Herbert Howells’s Collegium Regale setting of the canticles as well as Briggs’s own 2008 setting of George Herbert’s poem Let All the World in Every Corner Sing. At the offertory, the choristers will sing the anthem O Lord, Our God, We Thank You by Vicki Hancock Wright.
The afternoon concert will feature music by Franz Liszt and Maurice Duruflé, as well as Briggs’s own transcriptions of orchestral works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Maurice Ravel and Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and an improvisation on a chosen theme. Dancers from the Rye Ballet Conservatory will join Briggs to perform movements from The Nutcracker.
Born in England, Briggs has been artist-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City since 2017. Hailed for his unbridled virtuosity and passion for making organ music vibrant and accessible to a wide and diverse audience, he is one of the most sought-after concert organists of his generation, known across the globe for his brilliant organ transcriptions of symphonic music by composers such as Gustav Mahler, Franz Schubert and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
The 5pm concert will be combined with the annual gathering of the Rye Women’s Interfaith Committee, whose members will host a reception in the Christ’s Church parish hall afterwards. Please bring any non-perishable food items for the Committee’s Thanksgiving collection.
The concert is open to the public, and a suggested donation of $20 to the Christ’s Church music program will be accepted online or at the door. A link to the livestream is also available below.
