• Bach arr. Edwin London - Come Sweet Death (5 min) - get single scores
• Laura Mvula - Sing to the Moon (4 min)
• Whitacre - The Seal Lullaby (5 min)
• Whitacre - Sing Gently (4 min)
• Moses Hogan - Elijah Rock - get single scores
• Moses Hogan - The Battle Of Jericho - get single scores
• Moses Hogan - I Want Jesus to Walk with Me
• Whitacre - Cloudburst (8 min)

Selection from The Sacred Veil:

• Whitacre - Dark and Distant Year (3 min)
• Whitacre - Home (5 min)
• Whitacre - Whenever there is Birth (4 min)
• Whitacre - Dear Friends (4 min)
• Whitacre - Child of Wonder (5 min)

Total time: 55 min

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Palau de la Música Catalana

The Palau de la Música Catalana is a concert hall in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Designed in the Catalan modernista style by the architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner, it was built between 1905 and 1908 for the Orfeó Català, a choral society founded in 1891 that was a leading force in the Catalan cultural movement that came to be known as the Renaixença (Catalan Rebirth). It was inaugurated February 9, 1908.

The project was financed primarily by the society, but important financial contributions also were made by Barcelona's wealthy industrialists and bourgeoisie. The Palau won an award from the Barcelona City Council in 1909, given to the best building built during the previous year. Between 1982 and 1989, the building underwent extensive restoration, remodeling, and extension under the direction of architects Oscar Tusquets and Carles Díaz. In 1997, the Palau de la Música Catalana was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site along with Hospital de Sant Pau. Today, more than half a million people a year attend musical performances in the Palau that range from symphonic and chamber music to jazz and Cançó (Catalan song).

The chamber choir at the Palau de la Música Catalana, the Cor de Cambra, is one of the most prestigious professional choirs in Spain. It was founded by the Orfeó Català in 1990 with the goal of sharing universal choral music, helping to recover Catalan musical heritage and encouraging new compositions. Former choir directors include Jordi Casas i Bayer, Josep Vila i Casañas and Simon Halsey. Xavier Puig currently heads the choir, while Jordi Armengol is the choir pianist.

All the choir members are required to have excellent vocal and artistic skills, which mean the group has the musical abilities of a truly great choir. The choir has been directed by musical greats such as René Jacobs, Marc Minkowski, Kent Nagano, Simon Rattle, Gustavo Dudamel, Daniel Barenboim, Christophe Rousset, Vladimir Jurowski, Daniele Gatti, Simon Carrington and Fabio Biondi, and has collaborated with singers such as Philippe Jaroussky and Mark Padmore. The ensemble has been a member of The European Network for Professional Chamber Choirs (TENSO) since 2010.

Internationally, highlights include the choir’s 2017 début at the BBC Proms in London, a tour with Jean-Christophe Spinosi and the Ensemble Matheus in 2018, and the choir’s début at the MÜPA festival in Budapest in 2022, with a program of ensaladas and madrigals from the Catalan Renaissance. The St. John Passion by Bach, under the direction of Xavier Puig, and the première of Reconnaissance by Kaija Saariaho and Invocation to the earth by Xavier Pagès Corella, under the direction of Simon Halsey, were last season’s highlights. The most notable projects from the 2022-23 season included performing works by Palau de la Música Catalana guest composers Caroline Shaw and Ferran Cruixent (directed by Júlia Sesé, chorus master), the concert to commemorate the centenary of the Obra del Cançoner Popular de Catalunya, a second collaboration with Europa Galante and Fabio Biondi on Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria by Monteverdi, and a new collaboration with Franco Fagioli and L’Orchestre de l’Opéra Royal de Versailles, including two concerts in the French auditorium.

The choir is made up of some sixty singers who are between sixteen and twenty-five years old. Founded in 1986, the choir is currently co-directed by Pablo Larraz and Oriol Castanyer, with Paul Perera as pianist.

The choir has collaborated with orchestras such as the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona, the Orquestra Simfònica del Vallès, the London Symphony Orchestra, Lisbon’s Orquestra Gulbenkian, the Pygmalion Ensemble, the Orquestra Nacional Clàssica de Andorra and the Orquestra de Cambra Terrassa 48, among other ensembles. He has also worked with directors such as Harry Christophers, Raphaël Pichon, Gianandrea Noseda, Simon Rattle and Simon Halsey.

In Catalonia, the choir has performed in Barcelona, Girona, Tarragona, Cervera and Sabadell, while in Spain the ensemble has performed in Seville, Granada and Las Palmas. Further afield, the Cor Jove has given concerts in Poland, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Holland and the United Kingdom.

The choir has recorded several albums: Aigües de primavera (2010); Requiems (2013) by Mozart and Fauré, for Columna Música; and Musicals! (2017, Palau Records) by Albert Guinovart.

The choir has performed Requiem by Albert Guinovart in Palma, Girona, Barcelona, Cervera and Esplugues de Llobregat. The ensemble gave a concert of John Adams’ work Harmonium as part of the Palau 100 concert series, alongside the Orfeó Català, Palau Cor de Cambra and the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona, conducted by the composer himself. The Cor Jove also gave their voices to a new stage production of the opera Dido & Aeneas by Henry Purcell, with stage direction by Marc Rosich and musical direction by Esteve Nabona.

In 2019 the choir made their début at the BBC Proms, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, performing William Walton's Belshazzar's feast with the Orfeó Català and the London Symphony Orchestra and choir, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.

In 2021 the choir premièred an audiovisual production of Orff’s Carmina Burana on Palau Digital and TV3. The ensemble also recorded and gave a concert performance of Albert Guinovart's choir and cobla adaptation of Juny by Juli Carreta, alongside the cobla group La Flama de Farners.

Notable performances from the 2022-23 season included the “Música i poesia” programme, directed by Lluís Vilamajó at the Palau, which featured 20th and 21st century works; and the programme “Tonight, tonight”, which included a mix of jazz standards, songs from musicals and pop music.

The Cor Jove is part of the Choral School at the Orfeó Català, which is sponsored by the Banco Santander Foundation.

Grammy Award-winning composer and conductor, Eric Whitacre, is among today’s most popular musicians. His works are programmed worldwide and his ground-breaking Virtual Choirs have united 100,000 singers from more than 145 countries. Born in Nevada in 1970, Eric is a graduate of the prestigious Juilliard School of Music (New York). He is currently Visiting Composer at Pembroke College at Cambridge University and recently completed his second term as Artist in Residence with the Los Angeles Master Chorale. In the 2022-2023 season, the Cincinnati Pops and the National Symphony Orchestra will premiere a new commission: Prelude in C. Eric is proud to be a Yamaha Artist.

His compositions have been widely recorded and his debut album as a conductor on Universal, Light and Gold, went straight to the top of the charts, earning him a Grammy.  As a guest conductor he has drawn capacity audiences to concerts with many of the world’s leading orchestras and choirs in venues such as Carnegie Hall (New York), Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles), the Royal Albert Hall and Buckingham Palace (London).  Insatiably curious and a lover of all types of music, Eric has worked with legendary Hollywood composers Hans Zimmer, John Powell and Jeff Beal as well as British pop icons Laura Mvula, Imogen Heap and Annie Lennox.  Major classical commissions have been written for the BBC Proms, Minnesota Orchestra, Rundfunkchor Berlin, The Tallis Scholars, Chanticleer, Cincinnati Pops, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, National Children’s Chorus of America and The King’s Singers. 

His composition for symphony orchestra and chorus, Deep Field, was inspired by the achievements of the Hubble Space Telescope and became the foundation for a collaboration with NASA, the Space Telescope Science Institute and 59 Productions.  The film was premiered at Kennedy Space Center (Cape Canaveral, Florida), has been seen at arts and science festivals across the world.  Deep Field has been performed in concert on several continents, and with simultaneous film projection by the New World Symphony, New World Center (Miami), Brussels Philharmonic, Flagey (Brussels), Bergen Philharmonic, Grieghallen (Bergen) among other great orchestras.   His long-form work for choir, cello and piano, The Sacred Veil, is a profound meditation on love, life and loss.  It was premiered by the Los Angeles Master Chorale in Walt Disney Concert Hall, conducted by the composer and was released on Signum Records. Eric was Composer-in-Residence at Cambridge University from 2011 – 2016. A new version with full string orchestra will be performed in Denver with the choir, Kantorei, in Fall 2022.

Widely considered to be the pioneer of Virtual Choirs, Eric created his first project as an experiment in social media and digital technology. Virtual Choir 1: Lux Aurumque was published in 2010 and featured 185 singers from 12 countries. Ten years-on in 2020, Virtual Choir 6: Sing Gently – written for the Virtual Choir during the global pandemic that shook the world, COVID-19 - featured 17,562 singers from 129 countries. Previous Virtual Choir projects include ‘Glow’ written for the Winter Dreams holiday show at Disneyland© Adventure Park, California, and the Virtual Youth Choir, a major fundraiser for UNICEF.  To date, the Virtual Choirs have registered over 60 million views and have been seen on global TV.

A charismatic speaker, Eric Whitacre has given keynote addresses for many Fortune 500 companies, in education and global institutions from Apple and Google to the World Economic Forum in Davos and the United Nations Speaker’s Program. His mainstage talks at the influential TED conference in Long Beach CA received standing ovations. His collaboration with Spitfire Audio resulted in a trail-blazing vocal sample library, became an instant best-seller and is used by composers the world-over.