Vancouver Chamber Choir soars into the cosmos in Under the North Star, January 20
Ēriks Ešenvalds’s ode to the Northern Lights, Jordan Nobles’s multilingual names of stars join a stellar program at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre
Vancouver Chamber Choir presents Under the North Star on January 20 at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre at 6 and 8 pm
HERE’S A CHORAL concert that’s going to be out of this world.
In its Under the North Star show, Vancouver Chamber Choir is about to prove a Pink Floyd soundtrack has nothing on live voices accompanying the projections at a planetarium.
Sit back and watch planets rotate, meteors shower, and other astronomical wonders as the choir sings odes to stars, space, and the aurora borealis—all pieces by living composers from northern climes. The Space Centre has created the visual material to match the music and poems in the choral works—all projected across its 360-degree screen.
Amid the stellar pieces on the program is Andrew Balfour’s “Qilak”, with text praising the Arctic’s northern skies, all sung in Inuktituk. Elsewhere, Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds’s “Rivers of Light” is based on Sámi folksongs, and accompanied by visuals of the magnetic fields that make northern lights possible,
There is much more to haunt, inspire, and dazzle, ending with Jordan Nobles’ "Lux antiqua", in which the Vancouver-based composer uses the names of stars in
multiple languages as his text. The music begins with a soundscape of individual voices, moving slowly into dense canon, and then fading into a grand, cosmic silence.
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