‘An evocative plainchant of Hildegard von Bingen begins each half of this journey through a millennium of creation stories. Fauré’s late song cycle, La Chanson d’Eve (The Song of Eve) tells the genesis story through the eyes of Eve. We hear a little-known Mozartian gem about belief and conviction which you’re unlikely to have heard, but imagine if the Queen of the Night and Sarastro had couple’s therapy and worked it out.

After interval, a ghostly a cappella verse brings us close to Haydn’s Creation, with a ninety-second excerpt from Brett Dean’s evolution cantata In This Brief Moment in response. Sibelius gives us a rousing Finnish fairytale about a mermaid in the primordial soup in Luonnotar, before the concert finishes with two stunning songs of piano virtuoso Nikolai Medtner.

The brilliant Jonathan Ware dreamed up this program during lockdown and we've developed it through performances at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin and London’s Wigmore Hall. With candlelight, music boxes and displaced voices, it’s an epic concert of origin stories, with the human voice threaded through time.'

– Siobhan Stagg

Artists
Siobhan Stagg | Soprano
Jonathan Ware | Piano