“Great pieces of repertoire, rich with emotion, invoking imagination.”

CHAMBER & SMALL WORKS

Fratres – Arvo Pärt

Interpretation for solo violin, strings and percussion. Part’s tintinnabuli style takes us into a deep, introspective space of impassioned meditation. As always, the beauty is written by the silence.

Arbos – Arvo Pärt

LARGE WORKS

Appalachian Spring – Aaron Copland

Expansive, frenetic, and stalwart with the spirit of the American frontier, Appalachian Spring is one of the early great works of art music from the burgeoning adolescence of the New World. Teenage bravado tempered with the weightiness of newly donned adulthood, the transformation of America in the 20th century.

Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis – Ralph Vaughn Williams

The piece of repertoire that best expresses the intimacy and tidal power of the string orchestra. It envelopes you in both a shared memory with composer, performers and peoples past but also awakens a vision of the future.

Rhapsody in Blue – George Gershwin

One of the iconic pieces to bridge the audacity of jazz and the austerity of the symphony orchestra. In this rendition, one gets the sense that Leonard Bernstein is just having a grand time “playing” with his orchestra, the New York Phil.

Innocence by John Tavener

Austere and clarion, deluge of dissonant harmonics, Tavener’s spacious, cathedral-sparce harmonies concurrently envelope the listener in deep, inner meditation and blinds them in the cold, terrible, all-revealing, white light of judgement.

Song for Athene by John Tavener

A modern chorale, grounded in the orthodox tradition, Song for Athene draws one deep into the pools of mourning and gratitude.

REQUIEM

Requiem Op. 48 – Gabriel Faure

A setting of the shortened Catholic Mass for the Dead, the Faure Requiem is a poignant, intimate garden of subtle hues of dynamics, color and harmony, a sophisticated juxtaposition to the grandiosity the requiem had become.

Requiem Op. 9 – Maurice Duruflè

A consummate organist raised as a choirboy at the turn of the century in the great musical schools of France, Maurice Duruflè’s voice, steeped in Gregorian chant, brings the past into the modern age.

War Requiem Op. 66 – Benjamin Britten

A non-liturgical setting of Britten’s Requiem. Inspired by WWII, based upon the tritone, the War Requiem viscerally evokes the horror and destruction of war through twisted, contorted motifs of a haunting children’s choir, full and chamber orchestras.

Many composers have composed Requiems. Some of the most notable include the following (in chronological order):