IN BEAUTY MAY I WALK
Released July 2024
This album, In Beauty May I Walk, was recorded in St. John's Church, Elora following the 2023 Elora Festival. It weaves together a collection of pieces drawing inspiration from the theme of revelation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines revelation as, "a surprising and previously unknown fact that has been disclosed to others," and "the making known of something that was previously secret or unknown." Revelation, in the music contained here, refers to how we understand the ways we move through the world, passages of time, spiritual connections, the end of the life, and what can be revealed in the natural world when we allow ourselves to be open to it.
TO THE GROUND FROM THE SKY
Released July 2023
Continuing a long-standing interest in music written for percussion and voice, TorQ Percussion Quartet and The Elora Singers present "To the Ground From the Sky", an album of works for chamber choir and percussion quartet. Inspired by Paul Frehner's stunning work "Corpus", originally commissioned by Soundstreams Canada for TorQ Percussion Quartet and the Stuttgart Chamber Choir, TorQ and the Elora Singers commissioned three more works from notable composers Carmen Braden, Annika Socolofsky and Melody McKiver. The result is an album filled with emotionally charged and sonically arresting music that pairs the Elora Singer's smooth, flexible sound with TorQ's broad palette of percussive textures.
RADIANT DAWN
Released November 2021
The Advent and Christmas seasons are rich in their musical and textual offerings for choirs. Ancient hymns and newly-written carols alike bring the sense of wonder and hope of the season alive in communities the world over. Radiant Dawn: Music for Advent and Christmas brings together the old and the new, with both the comfort of familiar and beloved settings and new carols which become part of new Christmas traditions.
THIS LOVE BETWEEN US
Released May 2020
Reena Esmail’s This Love Between Us explores Eastern and Western musical soundscapes, even as it focusses our attention on a truth of many of the worlds’ religious traditions. Though it is not an easy path, there is still more that unites us, than divides us.
Barbara Croall’s Giishkaapkag (Where the Rock is Cut Through) responds to a recurring tragedy befalling women and girls in Indigenous communities of this country, but also of those around the world. Her powerful elegiac text and music hears their missing voices in the rocks, believed to be the oldest beings of the earth, and is transmitted through the haunting traditional cedar flute, the pipigwan, the voices of the choir and percussion.
I love Mark's warmth and curiosity in his programming. We look to music today to both challenge us and to comfort us -- to open new worlds to us, and at the same time, to show us how interconnected we are. I love that The Elora Singers show us that range in the work they sing.
This is a warm, kind, committed and generous ensemble. Because of the commitment of the musicians to engage so deeply in the music they sing, I found that I learned new things about my own creative process through my work with them.
Reena Esmail, composer (2020)
I was so honoured to work with such dedicated vocal artists on my Elora Singers commissioned work, "Giishkaapkag". I am still in awe of how everyone got every detail of the piece and the message coming from the heart.
It was an emotional journey to honour the missing women in my own family who still to this day have no grave or place for me to visit them. But through this choral work, there are voices singing to them in the Odawa language that they can hear on the other side and it's a way of making and keeping that connection through spirit to members of my family who disappeared.
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Mark Vuorinen for inviting me to compose this work, for funding part of the commission, to my anonymous sponsor, and to all of the singers, administration and recording crew who worked so hard on the CD project. Chi miigwetch miiniwaa.
Barbara Croall, composer (2020)
ADDITIONAL Recordings
- Christmas Music
- I Saw Eternity
- Eric Whitacre Choral Music
- Songs of Folk & Lore
- Patrick Hawes: Revelation
- What Child is This?
- The Wonder of Christmas
- Poulenc: Choral Music
- And So It Goes
- Requiems, Fauré and Duruflé
- Arvo Pärt
- In Song