The Lord’s Prayer, as it appears in St Matthew’s Gospel, is the most frequently recited of all Christian texts. It comprises an address, seven petitions, and a doxology. Pitts’s musical setting gently fragments the prayer by systematically repeating and dovetailing small groups of words. The text is transported between the various lines of the choral texture as the voice parts align with the opening singer one by one, petition by petition. The effect is ultimately one of intense unification rather than diversification. This unification is underlined at the doxology where the voices merge robustly in homophony.
from notes by Jeremy Summerly © 2005
