‘Night is full of light,’ writes the Australian poet Kate Llewellyn in her poem Faith. In this considered program, cellist Umberto Clerici joins classical accordionist James Crabb and the Adelaide Chamber Singers for a meditation at day’s end. This late afternoon program opens with Bach’s setting of a sixteenth century Lutheran hymn. Bach’s prayer for grace is answered by a different kind of hymn, the late British composer John Tavener’s haunting Svyati for solo cello and choir that draws on Slavonic liturgical music. The mood is momentarily lightened before interval with Bach’s robust and lively Gamba Sonata No. 3 in G minor, here arranged for cello and accordion.

In the second half, renowned Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds draws our gaze heavenwards with his soaring Stars written for a cappella voices and tuned wine glasses, and Australian composer Anne Cawrse’s setting of Kate Llewellyn’s poetry conjures the memory of a garden to rhyme with UKARIA’s own. In a yearning choral work, Joseph Twist sets visionary American poet Wendell Berry’s words. Berry’s poem searches for an antidote to the ‘despair for the world’ that ‘grows in me,’ until it finds a resting place in the night, in ‘the peace of wild things.’

Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina’s In Croce for cello and accordion dramatises a relationship between heaven and earth that is ecstatic, piercing and strange, before British composer Owain Park lulls us towards a gentle finale with an ancient night prayer reimagined for voices and accordion. As the sun sets, the program ends as it began, with Bach’s quiet, vulnerable plea for grace.