EXAUDI
Juliet Fraser, Emma Tring (soprano), Lucy Goddard (mezzo), Tom Williams (countertenor), David de Winter, Alastair Putt (tenor), Francis Brett, Ben McKee (bass), James Weeks (conductor)
One of the world’s leading vocal ensembles for new music will be joined by by local choir Tutti Voices to premiere Motherhood, a new work by sound's current composer-in-residence, Ailie Robertson, for three solo female voices and choir. In developing the piece, Ailie interviewed mothers in Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire, who were in various stages of motherhood, as well as midwives working at Aberdeen Maternity Hospital.
Complementing this piece are four beautiful recent commissions: Canadian Linda Catlin Smith sets Virginia Woolf’s haunting description of the in-betweenness of dusk to gently uncertain harmonies; Swiss Jürg Frey creates landscapes of chords, static and shifting by turns, as if from the remnants of chorales. Christopher Fox’s Song (24.iv.1916), written for the CoMA Partsong Book, is a passionate treatment of words from WB Yeats’ ‘Easter 1916’, while Cassandra Miller’sGuide takes a recording by folk singer Maria Muldaur of the Southern Baptist song ‘Guide me, O thou great Jehovah’ and creates a looping, ecstatic tableau of sound, with each singer imitating Muldaur’s original at different pitches and in their own voices.
Age recommendation: 16+
Content warning: the piece Motherhood contains sensitive and potentially emotive material.
There will be a soundconversation with Ailie Robertson @ 6.30pm
Photo credit: Matthew Andrews
