Our friends and RPS Corporate Members, Brighton Festival Chorus are joined by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with conductor Ludovic Morlot and  violinist Francesca Dego, for a nature-themed programme including John Luther Adams’s Vespers of the Blessed Earth.

Programme: 

Sibelius  Tapiola Op. 112
Rachel Portman  Tipping Points – UK Premiere
John Luther Adams  Vespers of the Blessed Earth

Following Sibelius’s orchestral hymn to the Finnish forests, Rachel Portman’s new concerto for violin, narrator and orchestra, featuring poems by Nick Drake asks 'has climate change reached a tipping point?'  How do we come to terms with the unknown world of the future? How might we re-enchant nature, and what would that look like? How might we harness our imaginations - surely the human superpower we each possess - to make change happen? With the violin as the guiding ‘voice’ at the heart of the music, it takes the listener on an emotional, imaginative journey towards positive creativity and transformation. 

Vespers of the Blessed Earth by American eco-activist composer John Luther Adams is a choral epic of prayers to Mother Earth, conjuring images of clouds, canyons and endangered birds, traversing two-billion years of earth’s history, through the geologic layers of the Grand Canyon, and invoking the calls of the endangered fruit dove of Papua New Guinea and the now-extinct Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō. For Luther Adams, music is a lifelong search for home - an invitation to slow down, pay attention, and remember our place within the larger community of life on earth. Living for almost 40 years in northern Alaska, he discovered a unique musical world grounded in space, stillness, and elemental forces.