Astra Choir: Cosmic and Terrestrial Dialogues

DIALOGUES OF EARTH AND HEAVENS

For millennia, experiences of earth-bound humans reached for the sky to express themselves. The vast celestial imagery above seems to transcend the divides of human expression below, between the secular and sacred, mythic and material.

The multiple voices of choral music likewise reach out to domains beyond an immediate time and place – a special kind of human expression that can traverse different histories and cultures.

In this concert, the  Astra Choir moves among  terrestrial  and cosmic images in dialogues of various kinds between earth and sky. In the hands of the early Lutheran composer Johannes Eccard the earthly physical stories of the Advent season, of a birth set against stars and celestial singing, are also shrouded in the fragility and menace of everyday human life.

Newer contemporary works in the concert extend such choral visions in a variety of directions, religious, poetic and ethical. Romanian composers Livia Teodorescu-Cicoanea, her daughter Iuliana Teodorescu, and Dan Dediu place the voices in an aura of East European sound. The contemporary Venetian Gianandrea Pauletta follows Claudio Monteverdi in invoking a vision of stars, in a vocal panoply composed for the Astra Choir in 2016.

From New England USA, the Ives-influenced Robert Carl contributes the world-premiere of the program, composed to his own text. A series of superlatives, of the highest and best aspirations, form a kind of statue of outstretched hands in choral sound.

The Astra Choir also re-visits a 1980s work by the legendary Australian jazz musician Phil Treloar, in which he turned towards Renaissance polyphony in a meditative multi-voice hymn to the “creator, created.”

Max Reger reached back into Lutheran history for the unusual structure of his Chorale Cantata No.2. Two multi-verse chorale texts, from the 16th and 18th centuries, are placed into a dialogue of two separated choirs with contrasting instruments, as a conversation between the Living and the Dead.

The Astra Choir and soloists,  with guests

Zac Johnston (violin), Andrea Keeble (violin)

Phoebe Green (viola), Alister Barker (cello)

Nic Synot (contrabass), Linda Kent (organ)

conducted by John McCaughey

Johannes Eccard, Claudio Monteverdi, Livia Teodorescu-Ciocanea, Phil Treloar, Gianandrea Pauletta,   Iuliana Teodorescu, Dan Dediu, Max Reger