Two glorious collaborations that will keep you on the edge of your seat

Dates & Tickets

Program Sponsor

Suzanne Timble

Conductor

Joshua Habermann

Artistic Director
Sponsored by Carmen Paradis and Brian McGrath

Assistant Conductor

James K. Bass

VIDEO ON DEMAND

Turn your home into a concert hall! Rent a full-length video recording of this program or view it any time as part of your subscription to Desert Chorale TV.

Prepare to be transported by two virtuosic works for strings and voices from the celebrated George Frideric Handel and award-winning living composer Tarik O’Regan. The program opens with O’Regan’s work, The Ecstasies Above, which is a setting of Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “Israfel,” describing an angel whose “heart strings are a lute, and who possesses the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures.”

“I’m truly delighted that the Desert Chorale will be performing The Ecstasies Above, a piece very close to my heart,” said O’Regan. “The work is really about perspective, about how sometimes distance is required to see beauty, and about how the immediate can be misleading. It’s a piece which requires concurrently immense rhythmic precision and textural warmth, and as a long-time admirer of the work of the Desert Chorale who embodies precisely this extremely rare combination in all that they do, I’ve long wanted the Chorale to interpret the work. Well, I’m excited to say that the day has come!”

We then continue into Dixit Dominus, showcasing Handel at his most Italianate with exciting ornamentation and rhythmic drive. Several Desert Chorale artists step out of the full ensemble texture for impressive solos throughout the piece. A chamber orchestra joins the 24 voices of the Chorale for this masterful program filled with musical acrobatics and ethereal soundscapes you won’t forget.

Click here to view the repertoire list for this program.

This project is supported in part by New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts.