A sonic exploration of the unique relationship between urban and natural landscapes found in the Bay Area.
Beginning on the dry trails of the coastal hills and among the shaded canyons of oaks, we start our concert with J. David Moore’s “Earth Blessing” and Pete Seeger’s “To My Old Brown Earth.” From earth and ground we look towards the water with György Ligeti’s four-part canon “Like a stream gently flowing” and Carla Kihlstedt’s magical “Herring Run,” pieces that acknowledge the magnificence of the creek and river systems leading to the bay and ocean.
Throughout the concert, the PWC explores our relationship to nature and the incredible natural beauty of the San Francisco Bay Area in pieces like Antonio Estévez’s “Mata del Anima Sola,” Fanny Mendelssohn’s “Wandl’ich in dem Wald des Abends,” Florence Price’s “The Moon Bridge,” and Levente Gyöngyösi’s exhilarating “Laudate Dominum.” And we close with exquisite “Stars” by Ēriks Ešenvalds, accompanying ourselves with shimmering sounds.
Pursuing the PWC mission of performing adventurous new works for treble voices, this concert will highlight two:
• “Despertar,” a consortium commission by four choirs, including PWC and Yale Glee Club, by New York-based composer Karen Siegel, playing with the fleeting and ever-changing magic of life and nature through extended vocal techniques and subtle overtone variations.
• “Am an Ocean,” composed in 2016 by PWC’s current Composer-in-Residence Julie Herndon, showcasing Herndon’s compositional interest in timbre and the space between ambient sound and music, as she expands text from words into sounds, and magically morphs these sounds into the sounds of the ocean.
Join us for an appreciation for the open spaces, coastal hills, natural creek systems, bay marshes, and expansive ocean that make the Bay Area such a rich and wonderful place.