Programme Note

Libera Nos, commissioned for the Choir of Merton College, Oxford, sets the sixth Psalm Antiphon at Matins on Trinity Sunday. The music is shaped by the text’s repeated supplication—“Free us, save us, defend us, O blessed Trinity”—a plea for deliverance from human frailty and sin.

The setting opens with luminous, mysterious chordal figures, gently swelling and receding as though emerging through smoke. From this stillness, high, intricate soprano lines begin to gather and coalesce, intensifying the sense of invocation. The music eventually returns to the soft, cloud-like harmonies of the opening, before rising toward a final, impassioned appeal: “O Beata Trinitas.”