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A concert of New MODERN a-capella Choral music
Hello music fans, arts enthusiasts, hopeless romantics and adventurers all!
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. This fully a cappella repertoire presents a collection of compositions featuring adventure, magic, mischief, romance, hope, anguish, joy, loss, longing – and of course, dragons.
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.
The composer WILL be in attendance to answer all questions at end of concert.
Please join us for this celebration of lavish literature and sumptuous song!
Event Links
Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/3051785-0
Sponsor: https://go.evvnt.com/3051785-2
