John McCaughey: Musical Director
Sunday 4 December, 5 pm
Good Shepherd Chapel, Abbotsford Convent,
1 St Heliers Street, Abbotsford
Heinrich Schütz, German Requiem (1635), soloists and choir
George Dreyfus, Does He Still Live, Josef Geisel? (2022), choir a cappella - first performance
Carl Nielsen, Afflictus Sum from Three Motets (1922), choir a cappella
Martin Friedel, Ponding from Sounding Royal Park (2020), recorded environment with electronics
Horatio : Prologue to The Measures Taken (1982), arr. for choir and piano
Allan Walker, Celan Fragment (2022), 8-part choir - first performance
Helen Gifford, Everything is plundered (2001), soloists and choir, poem by Anna Akhmatova
Arnold Schoenberg, Peace on Earth (1907), 8-part-choir
This concert traverses a dark path, from the Thirty Year Wars, with the epic expressive Requiem of Heinrich Schütz, to George Dreyfus's quietly dramatic memorial for a relative lost in the Shoah. Composed in his 94th year, this newest piece completes a trilogy of historical reminiscences for choir, the first two of which were performed by the Astra Choir in June.
Further 20th-century images emerge from a rich psalm setting of Carl Nielsen, from Schoenberg's lustrous vision for 'Peace on Earth' in the early century, and from Anna Akhmatova's transcending of destruction in the setting of Helen Gifford.
The concert also commemorates composer Martin Friedel following his death in early November. Allan Walker has composed his setting of Paul Celan for this occasion, and Martin Friedel's own music is represented in an environmental soundscape of a city park, and in his setting of Horatio's dark closing speech in Hamlet.
Short aural-video programs for online listening and viewing, assembled from the Astra Concerts archive from the 1950s to the present, and introducing new studio works from composers in the period of COVID-19.
Watch and listen to other Quarter-Hour Concerts
Astra acknowledges and respects the sovereign peoples of the Kulin Nations on whose unceded land Astra is based. We extend our respects to their ancestors and elders past, present and emerging, and to all First Nations people.
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Short aural-video programs for online listening and viewing, assembled from the Astra Concerts archive from the 1950s to the present, and introducing new studio works from composers in the period of COVID-19.
"We, like Salangan swallows..." (New World Records 2018)
Sticky Melodies (New World Records 2008)
Astra on Soundcloud (From Romania - Astra concert, June 2019 - and more)
Music always interacts with the architecture in which it is heard ...
Sound in Space documents with images and recordings how musical and architectural designs have formed an interactive partnership over three decades of Astra events.
