#6 reason to attend A Luminous New Year's Eve

Reason #6 to attend A Luminous New Year's Eve? What we believe to be the Canadian premiere of 'Had I not seen the sun' by Tarik O'Regan, featuring the poetry of Emily Dickinson!

Tickets at LuminousNYE3.bpt.me
Two-concert subscriptions: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3118232

Luminous Voices audiences were first introduced to the music of British composer Tarik O'Regan in October, when we performed one of the movements of his famed Triptych with a string orchestra. Looking on the composer's website, however, we don't see any Canadian ensembles having performed this work, so that's why we 'believe' this to be the Canadian premiere!

ABOUT TARIK O'REGAN

Tarik O'Regan

Tarik O’Regan, born in London in 1978, has written music for a wide variety of ensembles and organizations; these include the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Australian Chamber Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Sydney Dance Company, Chamber Choir Ireland, BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, and the Royal Opera House, London.

Currently he is working on a commission by the Houston Grand Opera for release in 2019: a full-scale opera about the life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, the famed librettist of three of Mozart's most treasured operas (Don Giovanni, Le nozze di Figaro, Così fan tutte). Highlights of the 2017/18 season include the Amsterdam revival of Mata Hari, an evening-length ballet commissioned by the Dutch National Ballet, and performances by the Orchestra of the Opéra de Rouen, Lausanne Chamber Orchestra, and the Alexander String Quartet.

O’Regan’s work, recognized with two GRAMMY® nominations and two British Composer Awards, has been recorded on over 30 albums and is published exclusively by Novello & Co. Ltd, part of the Music Sales Group.

ABOUT EMILY DICKINSON

Emily Dickinson
(1830-1886)

Emily Dickinson was an American poet who lived during the 19th Century. Born in 1830 to a prominent family in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson lived much of her life in reclusive isolation.

Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and the use of unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends.

Dickinson was a rather private poet; fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime. She died in 1886; the first collection of her poetry was published in 1890. A complete, and mostly unaltered, collection of her poetry became available for the first time when scholar Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955.

'HAD I NOT SEEN THE SUN'

'Had I not seen the sun' is one of two songs in O'Regan's Two Emily Dickinson Settings, commissioned by Craig Hella Johnson and the Texas-based ensemble Conspirare. It partners with the song 'I had no time to hate'.

Together, the two songs were intended to frame Conspirare's programme rather like a compositional 'inhalation' and 'exhalation', a crescendo and decrescendo, or a prelude and postlude. Densely textured, the music aims to hint at the many different takes and interpretations Dickinson's poetry evokes in its many readers. Each setting uses a solo soprano and tenor, their voices referencing the polarities inherent in each poem ('sun' and 'shade'; 'love' and 'hate').

Merry Christmas from Luminous Voices!

From our choral family to yours, we wish you and yours a blessed, peaceful and loving Christmas celebration. 

As our gift to you for your tremendous well wishes and support, we offer our performance of Brahms' Warum ist das Licht gegeben, Opus 74, No 1, by Johannes Brahms. Because let's face it: what better gift can there be than beautiful, luminous voices raised in song?

Merry Christmas!

#7 reason to attend A Luminous New Year's Eve

Jean Mouton

The #7 reason to attend A Luminous New Year's Eve? The chance to hear another masterwork of the Renaissance! 

Jean Mouton may not be as familiar a name as Monteverdi or Thomas Tallis, but his music definitely stacks up with those greats! Read our recent article about Jean Mouton and his Nesciens Mater Virgo virum, which we will perform at A Luminous New Year's Eve!

#9 reason to attend A Luminous New Year's Eve

If you've never been to A Luminous New Year's Eve, we do everything we can to ensure we don't interfere with your New Year's Eve plans. Sure we offer great music, but we purposely schedule our concert a little earlier in the evening so you can celebrate the New Year at midnight with family and friends, and not at a concert hall.

To sweeten our offering, we offer refreshments not after the concert, but during our intermission! We are again proud to partner with The Chocolate Lab, a local, award-winning chocolatier, to provide the goodies! Thank you, The Chocolate Lab!

At the Canadian competition for the 2017 International Chocolate Awards, The Chocolate Lab won four awards, including GOLD in the category of 'White chocolate ganaches or truffles', with its Orange Dreamsicle variety. And believe us when we tell you it was worthy of that award! Delicious!

Will the award-winning Orange Dreamsicle make an appearance at A Luminous New Year's Eve? Or will The Chocolate Lab have a special offering just for the occasion? Your admission to the concert includes the chocolate sampling at the intermission so you'll have to wait until New Year's Eve to find out! And if you don't have your tickets yet, here's the link: http://luminousnye3.bpt.me

#10 reason to attend A Luminous New Year's Eve

We kick off our Top 10 list with our new venue! We've moved A Luminous New Year's Eve to the stunning acoustic of the Bella Concert Hall at Mount Royal University! We love the warmth the hall brings to our sound.

Here are some excerpts from our performance of Martin's exquisite Mass for Double Choir back in October 2017.