Angel City Chorale (ACC) was honored to be at the world-famous Carnegie Hall on Sunday, April 13, 2014 among the outstanding choruses from the US, Canada, and England chosen to perform at The Drop of Dawn, an exhilarating evening of music by 2-time Grammy Award-winning Composer Christopher Tin. The evening, presented by Distinguished Concerts International New York and conducted by their Artistic Director, Jonathan Griffith, received a thunderous standing ovation, which lasted for several minutes, from the enthusiastic sold-out audience.
“It was everything a performance should be,” wrote Jeffrey Williams in New York Concert Review, “Polished technically and delivered with uninhibited joy by individuals who truly love what they are doing.”
The first half of the Carnegie Hall program featured Tin’s Calling All Dawns, performed by an array of spectacular singers and world music artists. The second half of the extravaganza featured 119 members of ACC who traveled to New York City to perform onstage at the World Premiere of Tin’s The Drop that Contained the Sea. The new song cycle is the sequel to Tin’s Grammy Award-winning Calling All Dawns, which ACC had the honor of premiering on the West Coast at its Spring Concerts last year.
“Tin’s new work is, once again, an exquisite masterpiece of cinematic music that navigates diverse musical terrain with thrilling fusions of orchestral and world music,” says ACC Founder and Artistic Director Sue Fink, “It’s a rarity to experience such immersive music, with this level of depth and complexity, and a range that spans from deeply moving, quiet moments to gut wrenchingly dramatic passages into one cohesive, absolutely gorgeous work that was created in collaboration with people from cultures around the globe.”
The title, The Drop that Contained the Sea, comes from a Sufi concept: in the same way that every drop of water contains the essence of the sea, inside every human is the essence of humanity. In keeping with this idea, Tin introduced a water theme in the prelude, then wove in subtle variations throughout the work. The song cycle contains all seven notes of a major scale – four descending and three ascending – representing the vast ocean of melodic possibility contained within a single scale.
Mirroring the flow of water through our world, different sections of the work evoke water in different forms, such as clouds, rain, and snow, arranged in the order that it flows through the world. Snow melts into mountain streams, streams merge into rivers, rivers pour into the ocean. Each of the 10 pieces is sung in a different language, starting with Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral root of most modern languages, then spans out to others, including Bulgarian, Xhosa, Sanskrit, and Lango. The ethnic rhythms of this fully orchestrated choral masterpiece transport listeners on a fluid global journey.
The evening at Carnegie Hall featured performances by an impressive roster of soloists including mezzo-sopranos Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek (of Anonymous 4) and Charity Dawson (from the Off-Broadway musical Disaster!), Indian Classical vocalist Roopa Mahadevan, Mongolian pop star Nominjin, Portuguese fadista Nathalie Pires, and Maori chanter Jerome Kavanagh.
“Christopher is a genius, the most brilliant composer I’ve ever encountered, and we were beyond thrilled to play such a key role in this amazing evening of music at Carnegie Hall with these fantastic world-class singers,” says Fink, “The New York event was definitely a high point in ACC’s trajectory… and we are even MORE excited to stage our own production of this incredible new music at our upcoming Los Angeles Spring Concerts in June!”
ACC’s upcoming Elements Spring Concerts will feature the West Coast Premiere of Tin’s The Drop that Contained the Sea, along with additional selections that explore the four elements in a variety of musical styles. The concerts are on Saturday, June 7, and Sunday, June 8, 2014, at 7:00pm on both evenings at the Wilshire United Methodist Church in Los Angeles. Additional details are on ACC’s Upcoming Concerts page here.
The Drop that Contained the Sea will be released on CD and iTunes on May 8, 2014 available on ChristopherTin.com. ACC sang on 7 of 10 tracks on the album. In addition to ACC, performing on the new album are the Grammy Award-winning Soweto Gospel Choir, a capella quartet Anonymous 4, the Grammy Award-winning Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, and Portuguese folk artist Dulce Pontes. For a taste of this exciting new album, please listen to the sneak preview at the bottom of this article.
Images from ACC’s New York journey to Carnegie Hall and reviews of the New York City event are posted on the group’s Facebook page.
Enjoy this single from Christopher Tin’s new album The Drop that Contained the Sea, one of the 7 songs on which ACC sang, featuring the Soweto Gospel Choir “Iza Ngomso (Come Tomorrow).”
“Upon finish, the standing ovation for Christopher Tin was almost deafening and, to me, it signified a very strong recognition of his new work, one that I think fans of Calling All Dawns will appreciate even more. In the end, it was a wondrous performance that captivated the hearts of all the performers and certainly this listener. – Don Kotowski, Game Music Online.
