Mozart Requiem & Christopher Tin’s To Shiver the Sky

This evening pairs two large-scale choral works with unusually compelling origin stories; Mozart’s Requiem, commissioned anonymously and left unfinished at his death, alongside Christopher Tin’s To Shiver the Sky, a work brought to life through the largest Kickstarter campaign ever mounted to support a composer.

Mozart’s iconic and distinctive Requiem opens the concert. The opening movement is particularly strong, Orpheus Choir balancing the painful and uncertain yet soothing quality of this sacred mass for the dead. As always, the Lacrimosa is a highlight, its tenderness and intensity making for deeply affecting listening. The solo quartet, Emma Pearson (soprano), Charlotte Secker (alto), Ridge Ponini (tenor), and Robert Tucker (bass), work exceptionally well together, prioritising blend and ensemble over individual display.

Tin’s To Shiver the Sky shifts the sound world entirely. The work traces humanity’s enduring obsession with flight, charting our journey from imagined wings and myth to scientific discovery and space travel through a selection of historical texts. Drawing heavily on the language of film and video game scores, the work is unapologetically expansive and frequently sentimental. Yet its emotional directness proves surprisingly powerful. The voices of great figures such as Leonardo da Vinci in Sogno di Volare, and Copernicus in Astronomy, become suddenly and disarmingly accessible through Tin’s settings of their personal writings. Ponini is especially moving as the golden toned voice of Daedalus, father of Icarus, delivering a beautiful and dreadfully tragic lament that somehow evokes the beauty of open sea and sky.

Tin’s writing makes inventive use of the choir, deploying it in radically different roles across the work. The early-music-inflected Become Death, setting Sanskrit verses associated with Oppenheimer, is exhilarating and fills us with dread, its austere sound world brought to life by superb solo singing from within the choir. It is not all evenly successful; the final movement, based on John F. Kennedy’s iconic “We Choose to go to the Moon” speech, and featuring unapologetic Americana and a children’s choir, feels less authentic and undercuts the impact of what precedes it.

Even so, this is an ambitious, emotionally charged programme, performed with commitment and care, linked by two very different stories about how communities bring music into being.