Chorage® #1
Luminous Night

Eric Whitacre (*1970)
Water Night
Sleep
The Seal Lullaby

Ola Gjeilo (*1978)
Sleepless

Ēriks Ešenvalds (*1977)
Stars
Only in Sleep

Ola Gjeilo
Night Rain
Dark Night of the Soul
Luminous Night

The Bach Choir's first Chorage 2025 programme focuses on Nachtstücke, put together by the Austrian conductor and choirmaster Franz M. Herzog (founder of the Vocalforum Graz, among others). He found what he was looking for in three of today's leading choral composers: Eric Whitacre from the USA, Ēriks Ešenvalds from Latvia and Ola Gjeilo from Norway.

The American conductor and composer Eric Withacre is a musician with a worldwide reputation, which he has achieved not least with his ‘Virtual Choirs’, which have virtually united 100,000 singers from almost 150 countries around the world. His choral works, such as ‘Water Night’ and ‘Sleep’, which often activate the vocalists' entire bodies and are sometimes actionistic and allow for aleatoric freedom, are open to a wide variety of styles and trust in melodic power.

Ēriks Ešenvalds is commissioned by choirs from all over the world. His symphonies of light and litany of the heavens bring light into the darkness of the mysterious existence of the universe. Only the sound power of the stars, which stand out from the darkness, makes us aware of the darkness and the eternal night. Ešenvalds does not shy away from including popular themes in his compositions, transforming and reflecting them with individual imagination and an extremely powerful tonal language. He unleashes an enormous variety of vocal forms of expression, from speech singing to sound paintings with lutes.

Typical of Ola Gjeilo's choral works are dense carpets of sound made up of clusters, long sustained, layered chords and the resulting overtones of individual voices. In ‘Luminous Night of Soul’ - the concert motto was taken from the title of the work - the choir sings of the night as an elemental phenomenon that was there long before music was sung by choirs, before poetry was written and jewellery was formed. The night as the soul of all works of art - and as a protective zone for lovers.