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PROGRAMME

David Matthews Dawn Chorus 
Meredith Monk Early Morning Melody
Eric Whitacre Lux Aurumque 
Ken Steven Dawn and Dusk 
John Tavener The Eternal Sun 
Nathan James Dearden The Bright Morning-Star 
Arvo Pärt Morning Star 
George Harrison arr. Kirby Shaw Here Comes the Sun 
Ben Nobuto Sol
Eric Whitacre Nox Aurumque 
Hendrik Hofmeyr Desert sun
Emeli Sandé arr. Alexander L’Estrange Where I Sleep
Meredith Monk Nightfall

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Conductor Ellie Slorach

Programme Notes

Join Kantos on a choral journey from dawn to dusk, through beams of sunlight, poignant reflections on love, birdsong, buzzes and linguistic nonsense.

Composers throughout history have been obsessed with capturing the perfect musical dawn. Richard Wagner composed the Siegfried Idyll for his wife, Cosima, as a joint birthday and Christmas present, to be played as she woke on Christmas morning; his music is plush, and seems to yawn into life from slumber. Maurice Ravel opted for sumptuous, grandiose beauty in his famous dawn from the ballet Daphnis and Chloe. By contrast, in his opera Peter Grimes, Benjamin Britten’s dawn is thin and meager, quiet, strange.

One of the first sounds you might actually expect to hear though, is the dawn chorus, of birds noisily starting their day. The idea of birds in music is a subject very important to composer David Matthews, someone who has been incorporating birdsong into his works for over two decades. Here, Matthews writes a piece for nine vocal soloists over a hushed chord. Each imitates a different bird: they’re not exact replicas, but artistic approximations, of song thrushes, woodpigeons, blackbirds and more, each heard in turn, and then briefly all together. 

Meredith Monk is one of the greatest and most distinctive musical artists of our times. As a choreographer, filmmaker, composer and director, Monk defies easy categorisation, but perhaps her most telling contribution to music has been as a vocalist, with long lines and supremely flexible technique. The first of those characteristics bookends this concert. Her Early Morning Melody is a simple, single line of music, stretched and tossed around the choir.

The hushed tone that Monk finds in her finale, Nightfall, has its roots earlier in the programme. Eric Whitacre, the king of hush, wrote Lux Aurumque in 2000, as a Christmas piece. It tells of another kind of dawn: of a baby, born in a manger, caressed by the sounds of angels. In Whitacre's celestial cradle scene, the lyrics speak of “light, warm and heavy, as pure gold.” This is also a point in Whitacre’s compositional career where his central tone cluster idea—where three or more consecutive notes scrunch together—really begins to take shape. The crunches are sharp but short, the resulting pleasure abundant.

Dawn is not just the sound of angels, though. Ken Steven’s Dawn and Dusk was created as a vehicle for expressing all the sounds of the human voice, though his musical language—of riffs and hooks—makes singers feel a bit more like instruments. Expect swoops, slurps, buzzings and clicks in Steven’s characterful survey of sounds based on the Indonesian Melayu scale.

In John Tavener’s 2007 piece The Eternal Sun, “the opening music for the main choir should glow with magnificence and splendour, representing the unattainability of the Heavenly Sun,” the composer wrote. A composer obsessed with questions of the divine, the sun takes on this godly quality in the piece. Later, though, the character changes, becoming an object of nostalgia.

Two composers trade ideas on morning stars. Nathan James Dearden sets words by John Milton, full of lively anticipation of a bountiful springtime. Arvo, by contrast, is more reflective. Pärt’s trademark stacked chords eventually reveal the central message, that “Christ is the Morning Star.”

Ben Nobuto didn’t set out to write about the sun at the start of his commission for the National Youth Choir, merely something that felt “bright, playful, manic, hopeful, joyful and sweet.” George Harrison wrote Here Comes the Sun in Eric Clapton’s garden while hiding from a business meeting, and probably thought along similar lines. The end goal of Nobuto and Harrison is the same, even if the routes there are entirely different: Nobuto delivers a typically frantic melange of information with restless energy. Here Comes the Sun, meanwhile, is just Here Comes the Sun, and it’s all right. 

If Lux Aurumque is Light and Gold, then Nox Aurumque, Whitacre’s companion piece, is Night and Gold, and, where the angels previously sang to a baby, now an angel, singular, sings of night and death, dreaming of sunrise and war. Hendrik Hofmeyr’s Desert Sun, a song of the Kalamari Bushmen, salutes the setting sun, and Alexander L’Estrange arranges Where I Sleep by Emelie Sandé for choir, where night becomes a safe place after a period of change: “This is us, this is love and this is where I sleep.”

And then, it’s Nightfall. Monk’s piece from 1995 follows a passacaglia tradition, where a bass line is repeated throughout the piece, underpinning the work while lines shift and merge above. “Nightfall,” Monk writes, “is an incantatory piece inspired by how light changes at the end of a day: the adding and subtracting of color and shadow; the slowly building and diminishing dynamics; the shifting texture as the sun intensifies and then disappears over the horizon.” Monk bids us a memorable farewell, and a chance to reflect: on the moment of searing hot intensity just before the sun sets, then, the murky light of day’s end. We sleep and dream and go again.

THE cHOIR

SOPRANO
Emily Brown Gibson
Eleonore Cockerham
Felicity Hayward
Sarah Keirle-Dos Santos
Emily Varney

ALTO
Louise Ashdown
Toluwani Idowu
Rachel Singer
Lucy Vallis

TENOR
Alistair Donaghue
Jonny Maxwell-Hyde
Louis de Satgé
James Savage-Hanford

BASS
James Connolly
Jonny Hill
Joshua McCullough
David Valsamidis

THE TEAM

Company Director Claire Shercliff
Creative Director Ellie Slorach
Production Manager Adam Critchlow
Communications & Audience Officer Ailsa Burns
Development Consultant Laurenne Chapman

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