If you want to listen to a requiem performed in a suitable venue, you might as well go to a church.

Columbia Pro Cantare provides you with that opportunity Sunday, March 13, as it offers a program anchored by Maurice Durufle's “Requiem” at 3 p.m., at First Evangelical Lutheran Church in Ellicott City.

“It's really a masterpiece,” said Columbia Pro Cantare music director Frances Motyca Dawson. “It's a beautiful thing. If you like the ‘Faure Requiem,' you'll like this.”

Dawson's group has done the Durufle Requiem twice before, most recently at Second Presbyterian Church in Baltimore in 2002.

For the performance, Pro Cantare will be joined by its chamber singers, soprano Laura Whittenberger, baritone Rob McGinness, organist Donald Fries, harpist Jacqueline Pollauf and the Howard County Concert Orchestra.

The sacred nature of Durufle's nine-movement composition is reinforced by this French composer's incorporation of chant from the Gregorian Mass for the Dead. Curiously, though, Durufle does not have a setting for a customary part of such a composition, the Dies Irae.

Durufle's “Requiem” is his best-known piece. Its prolonged gestation prompted Dawson to observe that this composer's very small output during a long career was at least partly due to his habit of constantly revising compositions.

He began writing this “Requiem” in 1941. As a reminder of what was going on in Europe at the time, this piece was a commission from the French Vichy regime that collaborated with Nazi Germany. When the Vichy regime collapsed near the end of World War II, Durufle was still working on the piece. It finally had its premiere in 1947.

Further revisions lay ahead. The composer did a revised version with an organ in 1949, and then revised it yet again for small orchestra in 1961.

Columbia Pro Cantare is doing the 1961 version, which includes an organ.

If Durufle (1902-1986) composed very few pieces, it wasn't just because he labored for so long on each piece. He had a full schedule as a church organist in Paris. In 1927, Louis Vierne got him a position as his assistant at Notre Dame; in 1929, Durufle was appointed organist at St. Etienne-du-Mont and kept that job for the rest of his life.

As a performer, he premiered Francis Poulenc's “Organ Concerto” in 1939; and he and his wife, Marie-Madeleine Chevalier, toured as an organ duo from the late 1940s into the 1970s.

As if all that weren't enough, he was a professor of harmony at the Conservatoire de Paris from 1943 to 1970.

Durufle's “Requiem” comprises the second half of the Columbia Pro Cantare program. Its first half also has some French flair thanks to two pieces by Claude Debussy: “En Bateau” and “Beau Soir.”

The first half also includes two English composers. Charles V. Stanford, who wrote influential church music in the late 19th century, is represented by “Beati Quorum Via” and “The Lord is My Shepherd.” And a 20th-century English composer, William Walton, is represented by “Set Me As a Soul Upon Thine Heart.”

Surveying the overall concert program, Dawson said: “There is a very complete scope with nothing that lasts too long as you sit back and watch the light stream in” through the church windows.

Columbia Pro Cantare performs Sunday, March 13, at 3 p.m., at First Evangelical Lutheran Church, 3604 Chatham Road in Ellicott City. Tickets are $20, $18 for seniors and students, in advance, and $2 more at the door; children under 15 are $10. Call 410-730-8549 or go to procantare.org