LEWISTON – The Bates College Choir will performs Mozart’s “Requiem,” the composer’s final work and one of the most intense and finely drawn interpretations of the Roman Catholic Mass, in concerts at 8 p.m. Friday, March 31, and Saturday, April 1, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Directed by John Corrie, lecturer in music and a member of the Bates faculty since 1982, the 80-voice choir will be accompanied by a 25-piece orchestra.

“This year is the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth,” says Corrie, “so our second-semester concert focuses on his last composition.

His student and assistant Franz Xaver Sussmayr completed the edition that we’ll be performing, and it is by far the most familiar of the completions of the work.”

Mozart composed most of the “Requiem” on his deathbed in 1791. A masterpiece of the choral repertoire, the work is “an unlikely but unforgettable alloy of ecclesiastical grandeur, Baroque fugue and the subtlest mood painting,” wrote a Portland Phoenix reviewer in 2001.

“Known for operatic music that can convey scene or character with a handful of notes, Mozart used that skill here to portray a believer facing death: feeling dread at the end of this life, anxiety at the prospect of judgment, abject yearning for forgiveness.”

The concert is free and open to the public, but tickets are required.

For more information, call 786-6135.