James MacMillan’s cantata for choir and strings, Seven Last Words from the Cross, was composed in 1993 and commissioned by British Broadcasting Corporation television. It was premiered in 1994 by Cappella Nova and the British Telecom Scottish Ensemble. The traditional text of the Seven Last Words from the Cross is based on a compilation from all four gospels to form a sequential presentation of the last seven sentences uttered by Christ. The best known of these settings is the instrumental setting by Joseph Haydn, who produced two different arrangements of his own work, one of them for choir. Roman Catholicism is an central component of MacMillan's creativity and determines much of the atmosphere of his large-scale works. He is a prolific composer of highly effective liturgical choral music and is known for having developed a choral language that derives in part from modernist composers including Penderecki and Lutosławski.

Wojciech Kilar, also a deeply religious composer, will be represented on tonight’s programme by his work Veni Creator. The composer once stated in an interview, “I’m a religious hedonist… for me participation in the Mass is a pleasure, even a spiritual delight.” Kilar was a Polish Avant-garde classical and film music composer whose greatest success came after his score to Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula received the ASCAP Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Producers in Los Angeles, in 1993. In 2003 he won the César Award for Best Film Music written for The Pianist, at France's 28th César Awards Ceremony.