SING FOR THE EARTH!
A Canadian Choral Celebration
Honouring the 50th Anniversary of the Canadian Music Centre
Sunday March 28, 2010 7:00 p.m. at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church,
Toronto
For Immediate Release – Toronto, March 3, 2010: Toronto’s
Elmer Iseler Singers and conductor Lydia Adams welcome spring
with a rousing Canadian choral celebration honouring the 50th
Anniversary of the Canadian Music Centre. The concert - Sunday March
28th at 7:00 p.m. at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church - includes
three world premieres: Ruth Watson Henderson’s Paths of a Luminous
Earth (libretto by Carole H. Leckner, commissioned by Ontario
Arts Council); Hussein Janmohamed’s Nūrun’ alā Nūr/Light Upon
Light! (commissioned by Canada Council for the Arts) and Jason
Jestadt’s Carol for the Night. Canadian works by Lydia Adams, Timothy
Corlis, R. Murray Schafer and Peter-A. Togni are also featured.
Throughout the evening, Lydia Adams (a CMC ambassador) and her
singers explore the ideas of light, unity, the sun’s relationship with
our planet and the spiritual and natural worlds and, ultimately, our
quest for peace and harmony on this planet. Each composer delves deep
into various “earth” topics and visions, taking the listeners on a great
choral journey.
• In Paths of a Luminous Earth, Toronto composer
Ruth W. Henderson uses the beautiful poetic text by Toronto
visionary poet, Carole H. Leckner, in a three movement choral
setting: 1. Fragrance of Life 2. Freely Given 3. The Truth, the
Light and the Way. “…and in that moment when heav’n and earth meet
in body and soul, the love of oneness is greeted and embraced in
wombs of gold and wings of gossaner. We are the way.”
• Vancouver composer Hussein Janmohamed explores ‘Surah An-Nur’ (The
verse of Light) from the Qur’an. Nūrun’ alā Nūr/Light Upon
Light! is an exploration, a coming in and out of clarity, in
and out of understanding and in and out of unison with multiplicity.
It is all about trying new things, expanding one’s being and thought
into the realm of the divine.
• Jason Jestadt, one of Toronto’s new, emerging composers, in
Carol for the Night Sky celebrates the nativity story by
viewing it within a larger historical and cultural context by
exploring how the pagan rituals and traditions that were part of the
ancient worshipping of the sun and solar deities and the deification
of the night sky by the earliest civilizations may have influenced
the symbols and allegory that are part of our modern understanding
of the nativity story using texts from the Egyptian Book of the
Dead, Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Sun, the Zoroastrian
Hymn to Mithra, the Roman Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the
Sarum Missal, and the Holy Bible.
•
SING FOR THE EARTH!
Sunday March 28, 2010 7:00 p.m. at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church
78 Clifton Road (at St. Clair), Toronto
Tickets: $35 Reg. $30 Sen. $10. Students w/ valid student I.D.
Group Rates Also Available.
For tickets please call: 416-217-0537 http://www.elmeriselersingers.com/
