Mozart's Requiem

A Powerful Live Performance of Mozart’s Final Masterpiece

Ottawa Choral Workshops presents a powerful and wide-ranging evening of music exploring wonder, mortality, gratitude, and transcendence, culminating in Mozart’s monumental Requiem — one of the most dramatic, mysterious, and emotionally charged works in the choral repertoire.

The program opens with a series of reflective choral works spanning contemporary and classical traditions, including Samuel Barber’s luminous Sure On This Shining Night, Mozart’s beloved Ave verum corpus, Mark Sirett’s haunting Prayer of Aiden of Lindisfarne, and OCW director Roland Graham’s setting of the E.E. Cummings poem i thank You God for most this amazing. Together, these works trace a broad emotional arc of contemplation, light, memory, faith, and awe before arriving at Mozart’s final masterpiece.

Left unfinished at Mozart’s death in 1791, the Requiem has fascinated audiences for centuries. The surviving manuscript breaks off during the Lacrimosa, leaving later musicians to determine how the work might have been completed.

This performance features the acclaimed modern completion by Michael Ostrzyga, a recent scholarly reconstruction grounded in contemporary research and close study of Mozart’s compositional language. The result offers a vivid and historically informed vision of how Mozart himself may have intended the masterpiece to conclude.

Performed by the singers of Ottawa Choral Workshops alongside professional soloists and chamber orchestra, the concert combines the immediacy of live performance with fresh insight into one of classical music’s most enduring unfinished works.

Featuring

Kathleen Radke — soprano
Danielle Vaillancourt — mezzo-soprano
Corey Arnold — tenor
Joseph Song Chi — bass-baritone
Ottawa Choral Workshops Choir
OCW Chamber Orchestra
LeeFang Hsiao — piano
Roland Graham — conductor

About Ottawa Choral Workshops

Ottawa Choral Workshops brings together experienced singers from across the community to explore major choral works in focused project intensives led by conductor, pianist, and educator Roland Graham.

Each project forms a new ensemble drawn from a wider collective of singers, creating a dynamic artistic environment built around curiosity, collaboration, musical growth, and ambitious performance standards.

About the Artists