https://lamasterchorale.org/star-2023 Choose Something Like a Star program - February 2023 Celestial Illuminations According to the cosmogony recounted in Genesis, God’s first act of creation was to call forth light—an act Haydn so unforgettably set to music at the start of his own Creation. The stars, also called “the lights in the sky,” became differentiated a few days later to further mark the separation of day from night. But along with this more literal aspect of acting as guiding lights, stars and other celestial phenomena have an inexhaustible symbolic power that choral music is particularly well suited to express.
The image of stars radiating from beyond the earth evokes a wide spectrum of associations in addition to religious and philosophical ones—from night’s promise of intimacy for lovers to the most technologically advanced scientific investigations. Our program explores this variety, but there is a unifying musical thread, as Kiki & David Gindler Artistic Director Grant Gershon remarks, insofar as these tend to be pieces featuring “light-filled and luminous” soundscapes and sharing a certain sense of flowing movement and buoyancy.” The first four selections alternate between Romantic and contemporary—as well as between secular and sacred—musical responses to the “starry canopy,” to borrow the word from Schiller’s Ode to Joy, the poem that inspired Beethoven to break new ground with the first choral symphony. Johannes Brahms wrote O schöne Nacht (O Beautiful Night) in 1877 to a text by a poet he set more often than any other, Georg Friedrich Daumer. The first of his Four Quartets, it interweaves a rich pianistic tapestry with the chorus’s transportive harmonies. If stars and their nocturnal setting provide a picturesque backdrop for the union of lovers in Brahms, Arvo Pärt’s Morning Star from 2007 heralds the Christian promise of light and life everlasting as a new dawn