Santa Fe Desert Chorale
Joshua Habermann, conductor
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.