Refracting Light

Chamber Choir Ireland
Benjamin Goodson, conductor

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Iannis Xenakis Nuits
Georgi Sztojanov Refracting Light
Arvo Pärt The Woman with the Alabaster Box
Kaija Saariaho Nuits, adieux
Anna-Karin Klockar Speeches

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Chief Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Choir Benjamin Goodson joins Chamber Choir Ireland for a programme of contemporary choral music at New Music Dublin 2025.

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Xenakis’s Nuits was composed as a protest against the cruel incarceration of untried political prisoners, and revisits the dark nights of the composer’s youth spent in a prison cell in Athens. It strips away language or recognisable words, replacing them with phonemes from Sumerian and ancient Persian tongues, oscillating between speaking and singing, talking and chanting, screaming and grunting.

 

Georgi Stojanov’s Refracting Light is based on the visual metaphor that just as light breaks into infinite colours and angles in a crystal clear prism, truth breaks in the prism of words, but all colours can be united into pure, undivided light. Arvo Pärt's The Woman with the Alabaster Box tells a story from the Gospel of Matthew. Female voices dominate the story of the woman who poured precious ointment on Jesus’s head. The displeasure of the disciples is conveyed through a duet of male voices; Jesus’s direct speech is communicated through the bass voices, and his prediction by the full sound of the choir.

 

Kaija Saariaho’s Nuits, adieux is about singing, breathing, whispering, night time, farewells. The piece uses texts from Jacques Roubaud’s Echanges de la lumière and excerpts from Honoré de Balzac’s Séraphita, alternating throughout in a sequence of ‘Nuits’ and ‘Adieus’. Anna-Karin Klockar's Speeches is an avant-garde choral cycle setting different historical speeches, including one by a French suffragist and another by a Native American Chief.