BRATTLEBORO — The Brattleboro Concert Choir opens the New Year with two concerts exploring “The Fall and The Rise: Songs of Redemption,” presenting a redemption story in two parts: Adam's Lament by Arvo Pärt is “The Fall,” and Dreamweaver by Ola Gjeilo is “The Rise.”
The concerts are scheduled for Saturday, Jan. 18, at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, Jan. 19, at 3 p.m., at the Latchis Theatre on Main Street.
Estonian composer Arvo Pärt composed Adam's Lament in 2009. The piece is a setting of a haunting Church Slavonic text by Russian Eastern Orthodox monk Saint Silouan. It is a stark exploration of the biblical Adam's grief and pain at being cast out of Eden, and then seeing his son, Abel, murdered by his other son, Cain.
Pärt's piece is filled with chant-like passages, cries of anger, pleas for mercy, and ethereal strings. In a news release, Pärt writes that in this piece, Adam represents “humankind in its entirety and each individual person alike, irrespective of time, epochs, social strata, and confession.”
From that “Fall,” the program proceeds to a “Rise” from the afterlife. Contemporary Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo's 2017 piece Dreamweaver is an English retelling of a medieval Norwegian epic poem, in which a man sleeps for 13 days, wakes up, and immediately rides to his church to recount to the congregation a dream about his heroic quest through the afterlife, from which he has emerged triumphant. Gjeilo's setting is deeply influenced by film music and is full of grand, sweeping, inspiring moments.
The BMC's oldest performing ensemble, Brattleboro Concert Choir performs an exciting and challenging repertoire ranging from classic choral masterpieces to rarely heard and newly commissioned works.