Bruissement choral

The senses awakening at night, a caress of wind, a contact with water, a barely distinct murmur of life: these are among the unique sensorial experiences offered to us by the Chœur de l’Opéra de Dijon, with a rare bouquet of exceptional scores.

Choral music perhaps provides the most delicate and sensitive terrain for the expression of the relationship with nature. The grand Anglo-Saxon choral tradition is shared here with lyric artists from the Opera choir: spiritual yet eminently corporeal, the voice penetrates the mysteries of the world in Eric Whitacre’s Water Night, inspired from a poem by Octavio Paz, and in John Rutter’s The Sprig of Thyme, which hails from the Anglican liturgical tradition. In response, we have Charles Villiers Stanford’s Blue Bird, one of his superb pieces for eight  voices, while the works of Bo Halten and Ola Gieilo propose great sonic snowscapes. As Wagner predicted in Parsifal, musical time transforms into a space under the empire of the voice, opening onto pictorial marvels, such as Britten’s Five Flower Songs (1950) and its wealth of revisited folklore, or Gustav Holst’s Two Eastern Pictures, of which the second, Summer, is worthy of the cosmic imagination of the author of The Planets.

Chœur de l’Opéra de Dijon
Musical director Anass Ismat
Soprani Corinne Bigeard, Isabelle Blaise, Julie Dey*, Cécile Dibon-Lafarge*, Linda Durier, Sarah Hauss, Aurélie Marjot
Alti Christophe Baska, Emmanuelle Heim, Sophie Largeaud, Dana Luccock*, Delphine Ribémont-Lambert, Véronique Rouge
Tenors Sébastien Calmette, Stefano Ferrari, Phillip Peterson, Jean-Christophe Sandmeier, Takeharu Tanaka 
Basses Henry Boyles, Thibault Daquin, Zakaria El-Bahri, Xavier Levy-Forges, Alejandro Meerapfel, Jonas Yajure
Harp Virginie Tarrête
Piano Masahiko Omori

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^{* Solos}

Z. Kodaly
Mountain Nights (a cappella)

J. Rutter
Blow, blow, thou winter wind (piano)

G. Holst
Hymn to the waters (harpe)

J. Rutter
Afton water (harpe et piano)

B. Sled
Ice (a cappella)

M. Lauridsen
Sure on this shining night (piano)

G. Holst
Summer (harpe)

E. Whitacre 
Little birds (piano)

J. Rutter 
The willow tree (harpe)

Ch. Stanford
The blue bird (a cappella)

J. Rutter
The cuckoo (harpe)

K. Gimon
Elements (a cappella)

O. Gjeilo 
Still (harpe)

E . Esenvalds
0 salutaris hostia (a cappella)

E. Elgar
Lullaby (piano)
 
B. Britten
Ballad of Green Broom (a cappella)

O. Gjeilo
Tundra (harpe et piano)