SEASON 32 | 2025

Saturday | 8 March 2025 | 8:00pm

Plymouth United Church of Christ

1217 6th Avenue | Seattle

Sunday | 9 March 2025 | 7:00pm

Christ Episcopal Church

310 North K Street | Tacoma

In the first concert of its 32nd season, The Esoterics is excited to remount this project of astronomical proportion by German composer Michael Ostrzyga! Over the last decade and a half, Michael has composed and published a cappella choral works for each of the planets in our solar system – Mercurius, Venus, Mars, Iuppiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptunus – and arranged them into a cycle called Planets and gods. These pieces not only explore the astronomical and mythological aspects of each planet and the god or goddess for which they are named, they also examine where science and belief intersect. In this cycle, Ostrzyga’s music allows and invites the listener to create their own association with each planet or god(dess), drawing on whatever imagery they might remember, or knowledge they might have.

Planets and gods will be intertwined with a new series of miniatures, entitled Strange solar system bodies, a world premiere commissioned by The Esoterics. Each aphoristic piece of this new cycle focuses on a singular body in our solar system (dwarfs, moon, and asteroids), each of which sets itself apart in strikingly different ways. Some boast an obscure outer appearance, such as: the quickly-rotating and therefore oval-shaped dwarf-planet Haumea in the outer reaches; the potato-shaped asteroid Bennu, which passes dangerously close to Earth every six years; and Saturn’s moon Mimas, which, due to a gigantic crater in just the right spot, resembles a white version of the Star War’s "death star." Other bodies amaze in different ways, like the former dwarf-planet Pluto and its moon Charon, which form an eerie double-system with the center of gravity located outside of the former planet. Ostrzyga captures these features and mechanics of these “heavenly bodies” in a highly condensed manner, offering fascinating music almost entirely devoid of words.

The Esoterics had to postpone this program last October, and we are SO excited to perform this concert for you at long last. We hope you can join us for this fantastic concert!

CONCERT REPERTOIRE:

[All of the music in this program was composed by Michael Ostrzyga.]

Event horizon (2022)

Farout (2021)

Flight (2023)

Iuppiter (2007)

Mars (2022)

Mercurius (2010)

Neptunus (2018)

Saturn (2014)

Strange solar system bodies (2024, world premiere commission), including:

Bennu - Callisto - Enceladus - Halley's Comet - Haumea - Hyperion 

Io - Mimas - Oumuamua - Pan & Atlas - Pluto & Charon - Titan

Uranus (2020)

Venus (2022)

Saturday | 17 May 2025 | 8:00pm

Plymouth United Church of Christ

1217 6th Avenue | Seattle

Sunday | 18 May 2025 | 7:00pm

Christ Episcopal Church

310 North K Street | Tacoma

In May, The Esoterics celebrated spring with the choral music of New York composer Martha Sullivan. A longtime friend of director Eric Banks, Sullivan is a founding soprano of C4 (The Choral Composer Conductor Collective) in Manhattan, and teaches music theory, musicianship, and composition at Rutgers University.

This concert featured Epithalamion, Martha’s setting of verses from Edmund Spenser’s wedding ode. Originally written to honor his bride Elizabeth, Spenser composed these 24 stanzas to depict each hour of their wedding day. For her composition, Sullivan chose five stanzas that focus on the delights and distractions of the wedding night. This cycle, which was commissioned and premiered by The Esoterics in 2009, is replete with the elegance of Elizabethan England.

Sullivan’s setting of Spenser was followed by two poems by Emily Dickinson - I shall keep singing and Put up my lute - which express both the desire to create and the frustration with indifference. This Dickinson diptych was followed by five settings of Shakespeare - of three soliloquies and two sonnets. In Shakespeare’s throat, we recall the song of Cloten’s “lark” from Cymbeline, Ophelia’s lament on the death of Hamlet, and wonder “Who is Sylvia?” alongside The two gentlemen of Verona. In her diptych Elements of distance, Martha sets Shakespeare’s double sonnet that employs the ancient elements in pairs - earth and water, air and fire - as metaphors for love, loss, and longing.

In the concert’s second part, The Esoterics performed songs of prognostication, a beacon, and fire-breathing beasts. In her Madrigals of Nostradamus, Martha rendered four French quatrains by the celebrated soothsayer that predict secret letters, bowing unicorns, embezzling nephews, haunted houses, and naked queens. This cycle will be followed by her setting of “The new Colossus” by Emma Lazarus - the same sonnet of welcome that is cast in bronze and mounted at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

To finish this program, The Esoterics premiered Sullivan’s six-movement cycle (of which two movements were composed this year) entitled Certain dragons. For this work, Martha penned a poem of her own and curated five others - by Keats, Sassoon, Yeats, Lazarus, and Longfellow - all on the theme of dragons. In this cycle of six songs we will celebrate the legendary creatures and their extraordinary nature: volatile, violent, and virtuous, fiery, fearless, and fierce.

We were so excited to welcome Martha to Seattle and Tacoma for the weekend of these concerts! Thank you for joining The Esoterics for this celebration of lavish literature and sumptuous singing! 

CONCERT REPERTOIRE:

[All of the music in this program was composed by Martha Sullivan.]

Certain dragons (2025)

Elements of distance (2010)

Epithalamion (2009)

Lazarus (2017)

Madrigals of Nostradamus (2002)

Shakespeare's throat (2016)

Two Dickinson songs (2015)