2019-2020 Season
Night and Day, Here and There
Sacred & Profane’s 42nd Season
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AUTUMN 2019
Winterlude: Songs of Sleep and Repose
Tuck in for a cozy evening of choral music with Sacred & Profane. Recognizing that winter is often a time of reflection and restoration, our December 2019 concert features sacred and secular music from all eras on the theme of rest and repose. In addition to work by English Renaissance madrigalist John Wilbye, we will celebrate the holiday season with Christmas lullabies by composers from around the world: Herbert Howells (England), Henryk Górecki (Poland), Abbie Betinis (United States), and the world premiere of Sleep, Baby, Sleep by Tina Andersson (Sweden). We round out the program with a selection of secular pieces on the theme of sleep. In keeping with our love for Scandinavian music, we will sing Gunnar Eriksson’s Norwegian Lullaby and Jocelyn Hagen’s arrangement of the dark Icelandic lullaby Sof∂u unga ástin mín. We are excited to sing the Russian-American composer and pianist Lera Auerbach’s Lullaby, composed with a unique modal musical voice. We will also perform Sean Crouch’s Lullaby, a setting of a poem about an Afghan father soothing his son to sleep during wartime, and Eric Whitacre’s Sleep My Child. Finally, we are thrilled to present the world premiere of Jack Curtis Dubowsky’s Sleep.
December 7–8, 2019
WINTER 2020
Luminous Resonance: Music for Chorus and Strings
Our March 2020 concerts will feature music for choir and string orchestra, in collaboration with the Bay Area-based Circadian String Quartet and ten additional local string players. This ambitious program will include Beethoven’s Elegiac Hymn (in honor of the 250th anniversary of the composer’s death); local composer David Conte’s reverent September Sun, composed in memory of those who died in the September 11th attacks; and the popular American composer Eric Whitacre’s Three Hebrew Love Songs for choir and string quartet. We are also delighted to present the US premiere of Karin Rehnqvist’s exuberant Day is here! for choir, soloists, and strings. Recently premiered in Stockholm, Day is here! is the companion piece to Songs from the North, the four-movement setting of poetry from the Arctic that we commissioned for our fortieth-anniversary concert in May 2018.
March 13–14, 2020
SPRING 2020
Local Vocal: Celebrating Our Musical Bay Area
Join us in celebrating our own artistically vibrant Bay Area, with a program featuring music by both well-known and up-and-coming local composers. We are excited to present Winging Wildly, a three-movement setting of poems about birds by the Bay Area’s best-known composer of choral music, Kirke Mechem. Our concert will also include selections from Mark Winges’ mystical Missa Diapente and Gabriela Lena Frank’s striking Ccollanan Maria— a work based on a traditional religious tune from Cuzco, Perú, the original capital of the Inca empire in the 15th century (with both Spanish and Quechuan text). We are also proud to sing several works exploring Californian history, culture, and natural wonders; including David Conte’s “Facing West,” third in his Whitman Triptych cycle, commissioned in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge; and Frank’s San Joaquin, a setting of San Francisco poet Bill Everson’s text about Yosemite. Other Bay Area-centric works on the program include Martha Steward’s A Fragment; San Francisco Conservatory of Music composer Joseph Stillwell’s lovely O nata lux; and Oakland-based Sanford Dole’s humorous Dance Steps.
May 16–17, 2020