The core of the program presented by Vocalia Taldea is made up of the suite A Ceremony of Carols by the British composer Benjamin Britten. It is a hymn to life and joy before the arrival of the Messiah, full of diverse rhythms, lively canons, simple melodies and a touch of nostalgia. The nine parts of this piece draw landscapes in which the choir and the harp move from joy at the arrival of the new year to the cold and dark winter night, passing through the battle against Satan that the birth of the child God entails. A solemn processional song that begins and closes the work contributes to creating a musical metaphor of the life cycle, the eternal return and the balance between death and life.
When approaching this emblematic piece, they wanted to complement it with something unique, new, and for this reason they commissioned the Basque composer Xabier Sarasola to write a piece expressly for this Vocalia Taldea project. As composer John Rutter did with Dancing Day thirty years after Britten wrote A Ceremony of Carols, Xabier Sarasola was proposed to create a new suite for female choir and harp that would take Britten's famous work as its inspiration.
The vocal group is proud and excited about this new work, Urtats elur, in which Xabier Sarasola visits Christmas music and the traditions with which the new year is welcomed in Euskal Herria from his personal point of view, and which has more special this musical adventure. The concert program is completed with Vier Gesänge Op.17, an exquisite collection of four songs for female choir, harp and two horns by the German composer Johannes Brahms. Written during his time as director of the Hamburg Women's Choir, almost at the beginning of his compositional career, these four songs are an exceptional example of romantic and tormented love, always linked to fatal destiny, longing and death. Brahms puts music to texts from diverse sources that together create a deep and tragic universe of nostalgia.
