aphelion

apehlion

Friday, January 3rd at 6:00 PM - St. Philips in the Hills Episcopal Church

Benjamin Britten wrote Op. 31 in the final days of the Second World War. Ever since, this repertoire has represented a canonic and unprecedented friendliness between the textual tenor voice, and the subtextual horn: two orbital bodies that rarely touch in the musical world. Each fulfills a similar timbral and emotional, masculinized quality. Britten’s cycle describes Earth’s darkest days both in literal and figurative terms. aphelion, meaning the orbital point at which a celestial body is furthest from the sun, explores that tense rare orbit of hornist and tenor through songs of solstice, of darkness, and of figures at the edge of orbit, all pregnant with the invisible, tense gravity between their unusual pairing, and inevitable union.

Host or Publisher Daniel Rosenberg