We are confronted daily with mysteries, conflicts, emotions, joys, heartbreaks, bombast, and silence.  In this concert, we use the sea and its unpredictability as an example of all things transitory – yet eternal:  life, death, love, hope, destruction, success, and failure.  The oceans have always been a source of mystery, power, turbulence, and peace.  “Oceans” touches on these ideas and emotions from several vantage points showing us how the sea is both wonderful and terrible, ever-changing and eternal.  

Two centerpiece works in the concert are memorials for those lost to the sea: Canticum Calamitatis Maritimæ commemorates the sinking of the passenger ferry MS Estonia in 1994, by Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi, and Himenami – The Divine Wave by Dan Forrest is in memory of those lost in the tsunami that followed the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.  You’ll hear two settings of e. e. cummings’ as is the sea marvelous, that leaves much to the imagination and allows us to consider the sea as a metaphor for love, existence, and eternity.

Jacob Narverud gives us the many sounds of the sea in Robert Bode’s poem I Hear Oceans, while Gabriel Jackson’s setting of Estonian poet Doris Kareva’s A ship with unfurled sails is a meditation on freedom.  Matthew Orlovic helps us hear of Australian poet Victor Carrell’s exultation in I stand over tides of ocean where “My body thrills with life, my spirit wildly bounds,” and Susan LaBarr’s touching setting of Jonathan Owen’s Forever Gone leaves us with a lover standing on the shore and lamenting love lost … or of a chance not taken.