Shared Ground | Online Concert

Chamber Choir Ireland and guest conductor Bernie Sherlock are delighted to present Shared Ground, a wide-ranging programme which highlights our connection to land and home, as well as to each other. The concert's title comes from its centrepiece, the Irish premiere of Shared Ground by English composer Alec Roth. Roth's setting of six poems by Vikram Seth was composed whilst house-sitting in the writer's home, once belonging to 16th-century poet George Herbert. The concert is bookended with spirituals Deep River (arr. Tippett) and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (arr. Keith Roberts), in a tradition that has long imagined a shared ground as the object of human hope. Sarah Rimkus offers a response to enforced shared ground in Uprooted, a setting of interviews with two Japanese-American women who were re-located as part of America's World War II internment policy, and a defiant response to the violation of ground is presented in Juris Karlsons' Rotala, which joyfully celebrates Latvian tradition in defiance of Soviet annexation. Ground transcends time in Ian Wilson's setting of Deirdre Brennan's beautiful poem Bealach Conglais – Baltinglass, the small Wicklow town where the present shares ground with an historically and archaelogically rich past. In Sügismaastikud (Autumn Landscapes), Estonian composer Veljo Tormis explores the discovery of new lands and their peoples through seven gorgeous Autumn miniatures, composed after visiting Hungary and meeting Zoltan Kodály in 1960, and reflecting the two composers' shared love of nature and of country. Pre-recorded in the atmospheric surroundings of the All Hallows chapel, the concert will be available to view for a week, from 8pm on Sunday 27th June.