Recent News & Recordings
GRAVITAS: Investigating gravity
With its origins in the ancient Latin word for “weight” or “heaviness,” our modern definition of gravity has come to describe the force that draws us downward, keeps us grounded, and embraces an outlook that is sober, serious, severe, and of imminent consequence. This October, The Esoterics will offer a concert of new choral music on this theme, GRAVITAS: to remind us and inspire us toward greater sincerity, solemnity, depth, and community thoughtfulness. This autumn concert program will feature two choral cycles by the New York composer Robert Paterson. Rob’s The essence of gravity is a four-movement onomatopoeic exploration of love and war, orbits and tides, from the violence of “gravity bombs” to the serenity of outer space. Paterson’s Eternal reflections is a cycle of heartfelt poems by Czeslaw Milosz, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Mary Elizabeth Frye. The ensemble will also reprise Steven Stucky’s madrigal Gravity’s dream, a whimsical setting of a poem by the composer’s longtime friend, Kate Light. The centerpiece of GRAVITAS will be the world premieres by the three winners of this year’s POLYPHONOS competition: Conrad Asman (from Cape Town, South Africa), Daniel Sabzghabaei (from Ithaca via Baltimore), and Vahram Sarkissian (from Montreal via Yerevan, Armenia). In My eyes are always hungry, Asman has set verses by Audre Lorde written in memory of Emmett Till, a black youth whose 1955 murder is often considered “the hate crime that changed America.” In The blue booby, Sabzghabaei has set a poem by James Tate that describes a day in the life of the Galapagos birds, and his vivid score extends Tate’s own poetic gravitas. In Mheri dur [The door of Mher], Sarkissian recounts a portion of the Armenian Epic of Sassoon, in which a warrior’s own guilt impedes him from crossing the threshold of his self-imposed imprisonment. All three composers will be joining us for the entire concert weekend, and we are excited to meet our guest composers and share their music with you!
Coming soon! The INTIMAS CD
The Esoterics' recording sessions for our April INTIMAS series were a great success, and we are excited to announce that a CD of this repertoire should be available later this summer. In the four movements of his 2007 song cycle, Messages to myself, Christopher Theofanidis has given voice to verses by Rumi, Whitman, Yeats, and Amy Beth Kirsten. These words inspired Theofanidis to create a series of meditations on various aspects of community: from finding one’s own voice and hearing the voice of others, to the benefits of critical thinking, loving one’s neighbor, and the interdependence of our collective humanity. In The wheel of time, the dance (2014), Aaron Jay Kernis chose to set four poems by the environmental activist and Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry. After departing the initial bustle of the city, Berry’s verses pay homage to the cycles found in time and nature, life and love, with images of light and darkness, field and forest, land and air, water and weather. For Kernis, the wheel of time allows for “the sweet enclosure of the song,” and inspires an eternal dance with everyone – our families, friends, neighbors, and departed ancestors. Through this dance, we gain an emotional connection to our own geography and genealogy, and even after losing ourselves, we are still able to find our own way home. This disc will conclude with Eric Banks’ a cappella choral symphony, This delicate universe (2015), Banks’ 32-minute works sets poems by the Greek-Egyptian poet Constantine Cavafy that explore five different “universes,” or meditations on connectedness: the sharing of one’s art, the familiar comfort of one’s neighborhood, the inextricable link between place and memory, the most intimate interaction between lovers, and the mystical, spiritual embrace of the great unknown, in “the sacred silence of creation.”
Greater Seattle Choral Consortium
The Esoterics is proud to be a founding member of The Greater Seattle Choral Consortium, the non-profit organization that sponsors the Seattle Sings! Choral Festival. The GSCC is comprised of over sixty choral ensembles in the Puget Sound region each of whom have a unique mission, but a common love of singing and choral music. Please visit our "neighbor" choirs and see what the GSCC is doing for advocacy and support of choral music in our community at www.seattlesings.org.
