FEBRUARY
Saturday 12 Theatre of Voices
John Luther Adams A Brief Descent into Deep Time world première
Friday 25 Aurora Orchestra with Roderick Williams
Songs of a Wayfarer
This month Theatre of Voices [pictured] returns to Kings Place to give the world première of a Kings Place/Carnegie Hall co-commission from John Luther Adams. Revered for reclaiming our connections to the natural world, John Luther Adams’s A Brief Descent into Deep Time represents a procession through the geologic layers of the Grand Canyon, spanning 1.7 billion years: “I’ve been busy following the rocks deeper into the canyon. Yesterday I passed the one-billion-year mark. The colours of the rocks and the beauty of their names have carried me away, perhaps too far. But, as always, it’s a journey of fascination, even obsession.” Theatre of Voices programme will be completed with David Lang’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Little Match Girl Passion and Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s striking refraction of John Dowland’s Flow my tears.
Two weeks later, on Friday 25 February, Voices Unwrapped Artist-in-Focus, Roderick Williams joins Aurora for a concert of journeys: from darkness to light, joy to sorrow, and regret to redemption. Curated with Williams, the programme opens with Brian Elias’s Meet me in the Green Glen for baritone solo and gradually builds up to the mixed ensemble used by Ian Farrington’s arrangement of Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen via works by Vaughan Williams, Berio, Judith Weir, Schoenberg and Roderick Williams’s own arrangement for string quartet of Purcell’s Three Songs.
MARCH
Friday 4 Auclair x Miryam Solomon x Evadney
Tuesday 8 Fieri Consort:
Excellence of Women: Casulana & Strozzi
Friday 11 Black Voices:
Celebrating Nina Simone
Saturday 12 Martin and Eliza Carthy
Sunday 13 Eugenia Georgieva
Peggy Seeger and Callum MacColl + Green Ribbons
Wednesday 16 Riot Ensemble:
This Lunar Beauty
Saturday 19 Colleen
Wednesday 23 Deep Throat Choir and Nouria Bah
Saturday 26 Mari Kalkun
Thursday 31 Gretchen Peters with special guest Tim Richey
For International Women’s Day (Tuesday 8 March) Kings Place host the Fieri Consort in partnership with BBC Radio 3. After nearly 400 years, their programme The Excellence of Women: Casulana & Strozzi reveals newly discovered madrigals by Maddalena Casulana alongside works by another of Italy’s greatest composers, Barbara Strozzi. Three days later on Friday 11 March, Black Voices, the leading female a capella collective, return to Kings Place for ‘Celebrating Nina!’, a specially commissioned concert honouring the music and inspiration of Nina Simone and to mark her great legacy of songs. The weekend of 12 and 13 March is then dedicated to folk music, starting with workshops from Sally Davies and Eugenia Georgina. Martin and Eliza Carthy appear on stage the afternoon of Saturday 12 and the evening concert features Cara Dillon. Sunday’s performances feature Green Ribbons and Eugenia Georgieva and culminates in a performance from the Queen of folk Peggy Seeger with her son Calum MacColl.
On Wednesday 16 March, Riot Ensemble present This Lunar Beauty,a subversive programme of hidden voices in which every work is intimately tied to the voice. On Saturday 26 March, Estonian musician, singer and composer Mari Kalkun, expresses the essence of her Southern Estonian roots in songs that are largely her own compositions inspired by nature, Estonian poetry and folk music. Mari Kalkun’s early evening concert is followed by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir who are celebrating their 40th anniversary season under conductor Tõnu Kaljuste. The choir will perform sacred and secular music by four of the nation’s greatest composers: Arvo Pärt, Veljo Tormis, Cyrillus Kreek and Toivo Tulev.
The beginning of April sees the reinstatement of several concerts that had to be postponed in January. On Friday 1 April, Julie Fowlis, award-winning Gaelic folk singer and musician, brings the first of her special curations as Voices Unwrapped Artist-in-Focus to Kings Place. Allt is a Scots-Irish collaboration between Éamon Doorley, Zoë Conway and John McIntyre, creating new songs inspired by modern and ancient Irish and Scottish Gaelic poems. And, on Wednesday 6 April, VOCES8 join Grammy-winning composer and conductor, Eric Whitacre for two performances of one of Eric Whitacre’s most recent works, The Sacred Veil.
Details for Voices Unwrapped are available here via the Kings Place website or here via the Voices Unwrapped brochure.