On December 15th, 1999, my mother passed away without warning. She’d been battling cancer but had been given a good prognosis a week before. Then, on that afternoon, she lay down to take a nap and never woke up.
Mother had been involved with the local arts council in Sheridan, Wyoming. One of the performances this organization brought to town on a regular basis was a symphony orchestra from Billings, Montana, about 150 miles north of Sheridan. A month after she passed, when the orchestra came to town for their annual concert, in my mother’s memory, they started the program by playing an instrumental version of the choral piece I’m featuring today.
According to Wikipedia, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings was arranged for a string orchestra from the second movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11. Barber finished the arrangement in 1936, the same year he wrote the quartet. The Adagio for Strings was performed in November of 1938 during a radio broadcast by Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra also played the piece on its South American tour in 1940. It’s the setting of Barber’s 1967 choral arrangement of Agnus Dei, which I’m featuring today. Click here to learn more.
Although I like the string version, when a friend sent me this video containing the choral version, that moved me to tears more than any string orchestra version. So, I’m sharing it today in loving memory of my mother.
By the way, for those of you who use the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, The Red Dress is available for download from their site here. No matter how you read it, please be sure to review it wherever you can. That goes for all my books. Thank you for stopping by. Stay safe, happy, and healthy.
New! The Red Dress
Copyright July 2019 by DLD Books
When Eve went to her high school senior prom, she wore a red dress that her mother had made for her. That night, after dancing with the boy of her dreams, she caught him in the act with her best friend. Months later, Eve, a freshman in college, is bullied into giving the dress to her roommate. After her mother finds out, their relationship is never the same again.
Twenty-five years later, Eve, a bestselling author, is happily married with three children. Although her mother suffers from dementia, she still remembers, and Eve still harbors the guilt for giving the dress away. When she receives a Facebook friend request from her old college roommate and an invitation to her twenty-five-year high school class reunion, then meets her former best friend by chance, she must confront the past in order to face the future.
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