HORIZONS brings music, poetry and song from the old world and the new to map a story that bears witness to the ambiguous emotions of migration: the inescapable loss and trauma, the unexpected beauty and joy, the cruelty and violence and the endless and often futile dreams of a new home.

In this special immersive concert experience, audiences will be free to sit, stand or move around the ‘set’ following the Voices singers, storyteller Nathaniel Lees and the sound of drums to a peaceful pasture of chamomile, the excited hubbub of a bustling market and the craggy promontories of farewell.

Songs, stories and experiences from lands very much warmer than this one to snow-covered peaks thousands of miles away from here will open your hearts to the ebb and flow, the tragedy, tumult and celebration experienced by people from around the globe and across the centuries.

Repertoire synopsis by Gregory Camp

Horizons begins with a group improvisation on the famous tune from Antonín Dvořák’s ninth symphony, which was later transformed into the popular hymn ‘Going Home’. As the choir enters the room, drones and fragments of the tune coalesce into a new arrangement of the hymn by NZ composer and conductor Brent Stewart. A solo line for baritone is embraced by thick choral textures as the tune travels through the space.

In ‘Arabesques’, Dubai-based British composer Joanna Marsh sets a group of poems by contemporary male Arab poets about women whom they have known. We perform the third and fourth settings: Abboud al Jabiri’s ‘Fading’, which asks us to imagine the gradual aging process, and Khaled Abdallah’s ’Seeds in Flight’, about an ancient woman’s rebirth after death. Marsh organises her music around octatonic scales (comprised of alternating tones and semitones) to create an aural equivalent of constantly shifting desert sands.

‘Laevas Lauldakse’ (‘Singing Aboard Ship’) is a setting by Estonian composer Veljo Tormis of a folk song from Ingria, the region of what is now Russia that lies on the southeastern shore of the Gulf of Finland. The song is a lament by young women whose husbands and lovers have been called to war. ‘Who will plow and sow the fields of Ingria’, they ask, as ‘the very shores echo back’ with the men’s voices as they sing on the ship.

The centrepiece of our programme is Shireen Abu Khader’s ‘Huwiyati Muhajer’, ‘Citizens of Horizons’, a new commission specifically for Horizons. This multi-section piece musicalises and physicalises displacement in the Levant. In Abu Khader’s words, ‘this piece tells a particular story of a boat that flips, killing dreams of peace, of finding a place to replace what one calls home, and of a decent life.’ Cheerful folksongs sung in the marketplace are interrupted by sirens, which lead to the singing of a famous lament, skaba, about tears descending onto the land and its people. A drum accompanies the next section, an escape that transitions to joyful arrival in new places. But then a storm hits as optimism is dashed and the singers are reminded of their lost homeland.

Australian composer Joseph Twist’s ‘The Peace of Wild Things’ is a composition for double choir. In this setting of a poem by American writer Wendell Berry, the two groups alternate thoughts about how to cope with despair.

‘Northern Lights’, by Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds, is an imaginative setting of a Latvian folksong which, like Tormis’s ‘Laevas Lauldakse’, concerns the dangers and hardships of seafaring. Ešenvalds combines the folksong with texts from the journals of 19th-century Arctic explorers Charles Francis Hall and Fridtjof Nansen. The northern lights are first met with fear, but then the sailors realise that in their frightening beauty they represent ‘dreams of travel into unknown worlds’.

The programme continues with two movements from Takerei Komene’s Requiem. Komene’s piece combines the Latin text of the requiem mass with Te Reo Māori adaptations of key phrases, allowing the two languages to reflect upon each other. In ‘He tūrama mutunga kore’, the choir repeats this Māori phrase, meaning ‘eternal light’, a direct translation of the Latin ‘lux aeterna’. A group of soloists sing the full ‘Lux aeterna’ text over the rest of the choir. ‘Nau mai rā’ welcomes the souls of the dead to Heaven, with soloists again singing the Latin ‘In paradisum’ above the choir’s repeated Māori phrase.

Our programme is bookended with another American folksong setting, Bob Chilcott’s rendering of the Shaker song ‘Simple Gifts’. We began with a song about the yearning for going home, and we end with this reflection on being home, safe ‘in the valley of love and delight’