New works by Southern Alberta composers Jesse Plessis and Sonny-Ray Day Rider are featured alongside a reprise of Zachary Wadsworth’s “The Far West.” Premiered by Luminous Voices in 2014, “The Far West” won the National Choral Award for “Outstanding Choral Composition” from Choral Canada in 2016.
Tim Dlugos texts for “The Far West” inspire rich and powerful music from Wadsworth, who describes them as charting “a trajectory from disease and darkness to reconciliation and light… The ending is not a happy one, but it’s a hopeful one.”
Tim Dlugos died of AIDS on December 3, 1990, at the age of 40. He had been diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1987 and had spent his final three years of life studying to become a priest at the Yale Divinity School, volunteering as a hospital chaplain-in-training, and writing poetry. His final poems document a dark time: a time of weekly funerals for lost friends and a time of progressing personal illness.
Special Guests:
Lawrence Wiliford, tenor
Luminous String Ensemble
