Haydn: The Seven Last Words from the Cross, with poems by Ruth Padel

Haydn’s beautiful ‘Seven Last Words’ string quartet is a meditation on Christ’s words from the cross, traditionally performed in the season of Passiontide. The texts that inspire each musical movement are called the Words of Forgiveness, Comfort, Relationship, Abandonment, Distress, Fulfilment and Reunion.

Alongside Haydn’s surprisingly serene music, Ruth Padel (who describes herself as a poet ‘born with Freud at one shoulder and Darwin at the other’) will read her series of poems Seven Last Words and An Earthquake, each poem informed by deep reflection on contemporary suffering and humanity.

‘Wonderful, audacious, minutely crafted. The magnificent central section about the crucifixion is an imaginative feat and her command of register is masterly, moving from formal to conversational with graceful authority.’ The Observer

‘Lyrical and sensual, albeit with a keen awareness that in war zones, music, love and poetry are side-lined even as they become more vital.’ Independent on Sunday

‘Superb collection . . . Sorrowful and elegiac, but ends on a note not entirely without hope’ Glasgow Sunday Herald

The concert will last c.80 mins with no interval.

Alexi Kenny, Tim Crawford - violins
Hélène Clément - viola
David Waterman - cello
Ruth Padel - reader

Ruth Padel is an award-winning poet, author and novelist. Her twelve poetry collections, shortlisted for all major UK prizes, include Beethoven Variations and We Are All from Somewhere Else, a prose-and-poetry work on animal and human migration. Darwin: A Life in Poems was an innovative biography in poems of her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin. Her poems have appeared in New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, Harvard Review and elsewhere. She has served as Chair of Judges for the T. S. Eliot and Forward Poetry Prizes, and as Judge for the International Man Booker Prize and Wellcome Trust Science Book Prize.

About the venue

People have worshipped on the site of Worcester College for over seven hundred years. The current Chapel is a breath-taking space decorated with paintings, statutes, stained glass and mosaic. It was designed by the Victorian artist and architect William Burges in the 1860s within the shell of an eighteenth-century Chapel erected on the College’s foundation. Burges’ decorative scheme includes all sorts of hidden meanings and fanciful features, meaning every time you visit the Chapel you’re likely to see something you haven’t noticed before.

A cloakroom and bathrooms are available nearby.