Brattleboro Concert Choir – The Fall and the Rise: Songs of Redemption

Brattleboro Concert Choir presents
THE FALL AND THE RISE: SONGS OF REDEMPTION

Saturday January 18 2020 7:30pm
Sunday January 19 2020 3pm

Latchis Theatre, Brattleboro
Adam’s Lament – Arvo Part
Dreamweaver – Ola Gjeilo

Music Director – Jonathan Harvey

Soloist – Junko Watanabe

With this program, we explore a redemption story in two parts: Adam’s Lament by Arvo Pärt is “The Fall,” and Dreamweaver by Ola Gjeilo is “The Rise.”

Tickets:
General – $18 in Advance, $20 at the Door
Youth – $10
Under 13 – Free

Available online: https://app.arts-people.com/index.php?ticketing=bmcvt

Estonian composer Arvo Pärt composed Adam’s Lament in 2009. The piece is a setting of a haunting Church Slavonic text by Russian Eastern Orthodox monk Saint Silouan. It is a stark exploration of the biblical Adam’s grief and pain at being cast out of Eden, and then seeing his son Abel murdered by his other son Cain. Pärt’s piece is filled with chant-like passages, cries of anger, pleas for mercy, and ethereal strings. Pärt wrote that in this piece, Adam represents “humankind in its entirety and each individual person alike, irrespective of time, epochs, social
strata and confession.”

From that “Fall,” we proceed to a “Rise” from the afterlife! Contemporary Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo’s 2017 piece Dreamweaver is an English retelling of a medieval Norwegian epic poem. It is the story of a man who sleeps for thirteen days, wakes up, and immediately rides to his church to recount to the congregation a dream about his heroic quest through the afterlife, from which he has emerged triumphant. Gjeilo’s setting is deeply influenced by film music, and is full of grand, sweeping, inspiring moments.