OUR NEXT CONCERT

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

This May, The Esoterics will celebrate the 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 will feature 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 will be 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 will be 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 will perform 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 will premiere 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 are so excited to welcome Martha to Seattle and Tacoma for the weekend of these concerts! Please join 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)