Saturday, March 4, 2017 at 8:00 pmUniversity of Connecticut School of Fine Arts

Anne D'Alleva, DeanJorgensen Center for the Performing Arts

Rodney Rock, Director

presents

Eric Whitacre and the Eric Whitacre Singers are represented by Music Productions Ltd.

+44 1753 783 739 info@musicprods.co.uk www.musicprods.com

ERIC WHITACRE & THE ERIC WHITACRE SINGERS

Music for Sacred Spaces

Media Sponsor

PROGRAM

Lux Aurumque Eric Whitacre Sainte-Chapelle Eric Whitacre Mouyayoum Anders HillborgLeonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine Eric WhitacreCome Sweet Death Bach arr. LondonA Boy and a Girl Eric Whitacre

Intermission

Miserere Gregorio AllegriYou Rise, I Fall Eric WhitacrePast Life Melodies Sarah HopkinsGo Lovely Rose Eric Whitacre

ERIC WHITACRE

Grammy-winning composer and conductor Eric Whitacre is one of the most popular musicians of our time. His music has been performed throughout the world by millions of amateur and professional musicians alike, while his ground-breaking Virtual Choirs have united singers from over 110 different countries. A graduate of the prestigious Juilliard School of Music, Eric was appointed as Artist in Residence with the Los Angeles Master Chorale having completed a five-year term as Composer in Residence at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University, UK. As conductor of the Eric Whitacre Singers he has released several chart-topping albums including bestseller Light and Gold. A sought after guest conductor, Eric has conducted choral and instrumental concerts around the globe, including sold-out concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra. In addition to several collaborations with legendary Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer, he has worked with pop icons Laura Mvula, Imogen Heap and Annie Lennox. A charismatic speaker, Eric has given keynote addresses for many Fortune 500 companies and global institutions including Apple, Google, the World Economic Forum in Davos, the United Nations Speaker’s Programme and two main stage TED talks. www.ericwhitacre.com www.facebook.com/EricWhitacrewww.twitter.com/EricWhitacre www.instagram.com/EricWhitacre

ERIC WHITACRE SINGERS

The Eric Whitacre Singers have established themselves as one of the finest vocal ensembles of our day. This professional choir draws in audiences with a wide spectrum of age, interests and backgrounds, performing Monteverdi, Bach, Whitacre and Depeche Mode. They received unanimous praise from critics for their debut album, Light and Gold, on Decca/Universal, also winning a Grammy for Best Choral Performance. Their second album for Universal, Water Night, went straight to No. 1 in the classical iTunes and Billboard charts.

The choir made their BBC Proms debut at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 2012 in a program which included a collaboration with singer/songwriter Imogen Heap. Their debut U.S. tour in 2013 held concerts in Washington D.C.’s Strathmore Center, Boston’s Symphony Hall, Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center and New York’s Lincoln Center. Their iTunes Festival debut, broadcast live to 119 countries worldwide, saw them collaborate with multi award-winning composer Hans Zimmer. A vocal library featuring the voices of the Eric Whitacre Singers and custom beds composed by their founder and conductor will be released in 2017.

www.ericwhitacre.com/singers

Soprano TenorMolly Alexander Ruairi BowenCamilla Harris Ben Vonberg-ClarkAlison Hill Matthew HowardVictoria Meteyard Gareth TresederGwen Martin Alto BassHannah Cooke Simon GallearMartha McLorinan Jimmy HollidayEleanor Minney Stephen KennedyChloe Morgan Ed Saddington Greg Skidmore

PROGRAM NOTES

Whether refracted around fan-vaulted ceilings in a cathedral, or bounced off acoustical pads in modern concert halls, the way we hear music is dependent on our surroundings. In this program, the Eric Whitacre Singers alternately evoke, echo, and celebrate the spaces which have given life to choral music through the ages, through the prism of Eric Whitacre’s distinctive contemporary style.

In Lux aurumque, a short poem by Edward Esch is transfigured into something altogether more ancient by Charles Anthony Silvestri’s Latin translation. Light – a heavenly light – finds expression in the alternation of simple chords with others clouded by the close note-clusters which form

such a central part of Whitacre’s style. This duality continues throughout the piece, with the final few bars evoking a light of a static, poised quality, ultimately resolving into peace.

The name Sainte-Chapelle immediately signals a shared concern with light, referencing the stunning stained-glass dominated 13th-century French chapel royal and its famous choir. Once again the text is by Silvestri, and once again the angels sing, this time from out of the stained-glass windows. The protagonist, an ‘innocent girl’, seems to suggest the Virgin Mary, encountering God with awe and wonder. The opening phrases of music have the character of plainchant, deepening the connection with the ceremonies of the Church, and introducing the words of the Sanctus, which becomes a refrain.

In Anders Hillborg’s extraordinary composition Mouyayoum, there are no words, just sequences of vowels and syllables. In the avant-garde soundworld and scoring – for choir divided into sixteen parts – the Swedish composer evokes Ligeti and Xenakis. Here, however, the focus is on timbre and a harmony of radiant translucence. The title, seeming like an ancient chant, is in fact simply the written-out sequence of vowels which the singers must perform, imperceptibly moving between them, with utmost precision. These subtle manipulations of tone give rise to harmonics, creating an other-worldly musical vision. Intensely challenging for the performers, the result is an ineffable and profound meditation in sound.

In writing a work to fulfil the 2001 Raymond C. Brock commission, Whitacre – once again working with Silvestri – devised a bold scheme, a three-part work to be called Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine. Working closely together, the two imagined a fevered genius tortured by the need to solve the riddle of flight. The setting, Da Vinci’s Italy, together with snatches of text in Italian, seems to have inspired the composer to a madrigal-esque treatment of the text, and harmonies whose cadences suggest Monteverdi. Indeed, the very opening exhortation yields to a sequence of suspensions straight out of the Renaissance composer’s Fifth Book of Madrigals. Leonardo is a dramatic choral cantata in miniature, sweeping the listener along as it soars to a climax, and then gently recedes.

The materials of the music of the past have always been a source of inspiration to composers. Just as Whitacre channels the Renaissance in Leonardo, so in Come, sweet death – also known as Bach (again) – Edwin London uses a Bach chorale as the source code for a meditation on texture and harmony. The chorale dissolves as the singers move freely from note to note, giving rise to fascinating and unpredictable consonances and dissonances. This deconstruction allows us to view Bach’s endlessly fascinating music through a sort of kaleidoscope.

A short, delicate poem by Nobel laureate Octavio Paz finds Whitacre in a thoughtful, reflective space in A boy and a girl. Muriel Rukeyser’s translation has both simplicity and a juicy richness, whilst the composer’s response, built on chords moving in parallel, leaves plenty of space for the impact of the poem’s final stanza to register, in a wordless coda.

The Sistine Chapel, at the heart of the Vatican in Rome, is one of the most famous ‘sacred spaces’ in the world, well-known for having bequeathed a treasure-trove of art to posterity. A great deal of music was written for this building by a storied succession of musicians, but all was to be eclipsed by one work. Indeed, one often wonders what Gregorio Allegri would think of the strange and special legacy of his Miserere. By preventing the transmission of the piece outside the walls of the Vatican, the Papacy preserved for many years the mystique of this secret composition.

A fairly straightforward, penitential setting of a supplicatory psalm, Allegri wrote it as a falsobordone – that is, a piece in which text is recited on a chord before a concluding formula – and based it on the ancient tonus peregrinus. One imagines it would have caused him no moderate amount of shock to learn that his work, transmuted through a centuries-long process of embellishment and alteration by generations of musicians, would one day lay claim to being the most famous piece of choral music in the world. Those embellishments go some way towards explaining this – the famous high C, which derives from the ornamentation with which the skilled singers of the Papal Choir of the Sistine Chapel would regularly elaborate on written music.

You Rise, I Fall, a new work, continues Whitacre’s career-long collaboration with Silvestri. The poet writes: “’You rise, I fall’ is an intensely personal poem. It speaks of perhaps the defining moment of my life’s journey: the

death of my wife, Julie, at age 35, from ovarian cancer. This poem captures the moment of her death, after her long struggle to stay with us. It speaks of the intense paradox between sadness and relief one feels while caring for someone who is actively dying of a wasting disease. This text is part of a larger work, ‘The Sacred Veil’, in which I explore the journey of a soul across the threshold between finitude and eternity into and, ultimately, out of this life. I am grateful to my friend Eric Whitacre for encouraging me to make this journey of reflection, to revisit old scars, and in the process to move so much closer toward healing.”

Sarah Hopkins’ instructional notes on the performance of her work Past Life Melodies immediately mark it out as something rather out of the ordinary. ‘Before beginning to sing’, she writes, ‘…visualize world peace and joy in abundance’. The piece calls for a number of unusual vocal techniques, including overtone singing – manipulating the shape of the vowel in order to produce tones in the harmonic series, like the sound of a bell tolling. It also features the use of what Hopkins calls ‘chant voice’, derived from the composer’s study of indigenous vocalizations from her native Australia. These sounds have inspired the composer to a music which is earthy and rooted.

Go, lovely rose was in many respects the work that kick-started Whitacre’s compositional career, and it is fitting that it concludes this concert. Asked to provide a setting of Edmund Waller’s poem for his choir at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the young composer responded with this affecting and tender piece. Already in place are the love of a close-knit texture and an understanding of choral sonority which would become hallmarks of his style. This, married to an appealing popular sensibility, has assured him a place at the forefront of contemporary choral composers.

– Notes by James M. Potter, 2017