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EAR #36 Dear choral colleagues, Pro Coro is getting ready for the season end performance tomorrow, Saturday June 18, here in Edmonton. It’s been a great year, despite all the challenges, and we’ve performed a lot of great a cappella music including 12 premiers by Emerging Canadian composers. At tomorrow’s concert Doors of Heaven you will hear a world premiere by Swedish composer Henrik Dahlgren. Pro Coro met Henrik at the Choral Art program at the Banff Centre, just a couple weeks before the pandemic started. We performed several of his compositions during the residency in Banff. Henrik has since been able to establish meaningful connections with our Canadian choirs and conductors, and we’re happy to have helped along the way. His composition “Prayer” uses a narrator to get the intimate feeling of the poetry across (read below), and when we sang through the work the first time, it was one of those moments that takes you by surprise with its sudden power. It is a fascinating mood Henrik creates in the opening section, and its simplicity provides an open door to the imagery of the poem. As mentioned last week, we also have our EAR Ryan with us this week, and he will conduct several works in the concert. It’s been great working with him, and the choir was able to provide some Aha-moments for him! I hope you can tune-in and listen, or attend in-person. After next week’s edition, the EAR newsletter will take a summer break before we re-start in the fall. I hope you are enjoying our introductions, explorations and tips & tricks.
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