PROMISE & PROPHECY: Sonnet, saga, soliloquy and sorcery

This May, The Esoterics will celebrate Spring with the choral music of New York composer Martha Sullivan. Sullivan is a founding soprano of C4 (The Choral Composer Conductor Collective) in Manhattan, and teaches music theory, musicianship, and composition at Rutgers University. The centerpiece of the program will feature Epithalamion, Martha’s setting of verse from Edmund Spenser’s wedding ode - 24 stanzas to depict each hour of their wedding day in honor of his bride, Elizabeth. Sullivan sets five of these stanzas that focus on the delights and distractions of the wedding night. This cycle, originally commissioned and premiered by The Esoterics in 2009, is replete with the elegance of Elizabethan England. Following this are settings from Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare – each depicting moods and metaphors on themes of love, lament and longing; the desire to create and the frustration with indifference. Then comes Madrigals of Nostradamus – four French quatrains by the celebrated soothsayer that predict secret letters, bowing unicorns, embezzling nephews, haunted houses and naked queens. This cycle will be followed by Martha’s setting of “The new Colossus” by Emma Lazarus – the same sonnet of welcome that is cast in bronze and mounted at the base of the Statue of Liberty. To finish the program, The Esoterics will premiere Sullivan’s six-movement cycle entitled Certain dragons. For this work, Martha penned a poem of her own and curated five others – by Keats, Sassoon, Yeats, Lazarus and Longfellow – all on the theme of dragons. In these six songs, we will celebrate the legendary creatures and their extraordinary nature: volatile, violent and virtuous; fiery, fearless and fierce. Please join us for this celebration of lavish literature and sumptuous song! ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Each Esoterics project is a distinctive and unrepeatable experience, both for performers and our audience-community. This project is no exception, so treat yourself to an evening of music that will leave you enchanted, delighted and enriched. Now in its 32nd season, Seattle’s most innovative chorus has drawn international praise for performing rarely-heard compositions of contemporary music for unaccompanied voices, for infusing elements of the literary, theatrical, and visual arts into the typical concert experience, and for performing settings of poetry, philosophy, and spiritual writings from around the world. Since its founding in 1993, The Esoterics has performed more than 500 concerts throughout the Pacific Northwest, has commissioned and premiered more than 250 new works for a cappella voices in dozens of languages, and has mastered the most virtuosic choral compositions of the last century. The Esoterics has released twenty-one CD recordings – several which have been favorably reviewed in The Gramophone and American Record Guide. The ensemble has toured to England, Ireland, Wales, Finland, Spain, and Portugal, and has been featured in the BBC Radio program “The Choir.” Always on the search for the next great choral masterpiece, The Esoterics inaugurated its annual choral composition competition, POLYPHONOS, in 2006. In recognition for its efforts in choral innovation, The Esoterics has been honored five times with the ASCAP / Chorus America Award for the Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music (in 2001, 2003, 2006, 2008, and 2017). The Esoterics is a proud member of the American Choral Director’s Association, Chorus America, and the International Federation for Choral Music.

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