An October Garden

Praised by The New York Times for their “incisive, agile strength,” Downtown Voices, Trinity’s semiprofessional choir, presents their first concert of the season featuring two works by American composers Julian Wachner and Morten Lauridsen.

The choir will present a new composition for choir, flute, clarinet, and piano, by Julian Wachner, Trinity's Director of Music, titled An October Garden. A four movement work based on poems by Christina Rossetti, An October Garden explores what has been described as “the inherent joy and drama of the life-cycle." An October Garden had its New York premiere last April with Wachner leading the Washington Master Chorale Chamber Choir with NOVUS NY in Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall.

Morten Lauridsen's Midwinter Songs is a choral cycle set to five poems by Robert Graves. Connected by recurring motifs and phrases against the backdrop of winter, the poems are about love, sex, and death. Lauridsen is an American composer and professor of composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music. He is a National Medal of Arts recipient and his works are frequently performed all over the world.