There is Sweet Music: Choral Expressions of Comfort and Connection

“There is Sweet Music” – a stanza from Tennyson’s lyric poem “The Lotos-Eaters” – extols the power of music to engage, calm, and inspire – perhaps a worthy aspiration as we face the division and uncertainty of our current times. Two choral settings of Tennyson’s verse, by living composers Robert Hobby and Daniel Gawthrop, open the first and second halves of Oriana’s concert; they are followed by beloved folk song settings from the British Isles by Gawthrop, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Alice Parker, and Ēriks Ešenvalds; expressive French songs of Claude Debussy, Camille Saint-Saens, and Francis Poulenc; and universal sacred settings by Heinrich Schütz, Salamone Rossi, Randall Thompson, Charles Villiers Stanford, Williametta Spencer, Ešenvalds, and Rosephanye Powell.