Our first-ever two-concert program, CIVITAS is a reconstruction of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, featuring renaissance-era settings of the biblical texts alongside stunning contemporary pieces and five world premieres.

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The Lamentations are a chronicle of loss.  These sacred poems bemoan a fallen city and a broken society. But from all this grief, a rich musical tradition emerged, and has transcended centuries.  The texts are traditionally framed as “Lessons”, for which composers wrote elaborate initials (letters of the Hebrew alphabet set to music) as introductions to each line.  Our program takes up this framework, but replaces much of the biblical material with contemporary poetry and music, carefully curated to question the fatalism of the Lamentations.

 

In her SIX VARIATIONS, poet Denise Levertov writes:

 

Through the hollow globe, a ring

of frayed rusty scrapiron,

is it the sea that shines?

Is it a road at the world’s edge?

 

Across both concerts, there's early music from Tallis, Lobo, di Lasso, and many others, music from monumental 20th century composers including Britten, Rachmaninoff, and Tavener, contemporary pieces by Cecilia McDowall, Roderick Williams, Tigran Hamasyan, Thomas Adès, and more.  This was also the largest commissioning project in KHORIKOS history, yielding brand-new works  by our composer-collaborators Evelin Seppar, Andrew Smith, Ben Zucker, and Alec Galambos.

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We can also present CIVITAS as one evening-length program.

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Sign up on our mailing list for announcements of future performances. We hope you can join us for this powerful journey through collapse, recovery, reflection, and return.

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Our gratitude to Gabe Smoller for his art above.