Northern Lights by Ēriks Ešenvalds

Performed by the Providence Singers, at their spring 2017 concert "Music of Scandinavia and the Baltics." Christine Noel conducting. Joseph Burdick, tenor solo.
The ecstatic collision of energetic charged particles with atoms in the high altitude atmosphere known as the ‘aurora borealis’ is the subject of Northern Lights, commissioned in 2012. Ešenvalds combines a Latvian folk song, sung by a solo tenor, with less fearful, and factual, observations of the Northern Lights by two nineteenth-century Arctic explorers, Charles Francis Hall and Fridtjof Nansen. In a lilting triple-time metre throughout, with tuned glasses played by the singers adding an unearthly aura at salient points, the music is full of wonder, with an especially dramatic moment of revelation early on. Twice, a moment of special transcendence is summoned up by the gentle sound of chimes and, after a return of the opening folk song, it is they who have the last word in a quiet, but questioning, apotheosis of magical bell-sounds.
- from notes by Gabriel Jackson © 2015

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Fantastic performance of one of my favorite pieces.