EL CAMINO: Talbot, Casals and Victoria

New York City’s leading chamber choir, Musica Viva NY, will present EL CAMINO: Talbot, Casals and Victoria, a one-night only winter concert on the Upper East Side at All Souls NYC with a pre-concert talk at 4:15pm. Weaving together voices of lament, resilience, and spiritual transformation across centuries, the acclaimed Musica Viva NY chorus takes listeners on a journey from lamentation to revelation. The program’s capstone is a 60-minute a capella masterpiece of the modern choral repertory: Path of Miracles by Joby Talbot.

Dramatizing the medieval religious pilgrimage along Spain’s famous Camino de Compostela, the four movements of Path of Miracles are titled with the names of the four main staging posts of the ‘Camino Frances,’ the central axis of a network of pilgrimage routes to Santiago. Written by British composer Joby Talbot (b.1971) with passages in English, Galician and Latin, this iconic and impactful piece made a lasting mark on the international choral scene. “This is musical mysticism at its richest and most greedy – grasping from all traditions and sources and treasuring each element in this musical collage. But it’s a work whose patchwork fragments need the energy of live performance to really knit, relying on the charge of emotion, of ritual, to integrate them into a larger artistic gesture.” (Gramophone)

Also on the program are two sorrowful O vos omnes, as well as a trio of African American spirituals blending traditional spiritual elements with complex choral layering and call-and-response.