Product Review

Threshold of Night presents the Austin-based choral group in a program of premiere recordings of new works for voices and strings by the award-winning young British composer Tarik O'Regan. These peices- setting texts of British and North and South American writers - explore teh ecstasies of heaven and the challenges of life on Earth. O'Regan's is a music of polarities, sometimes contained with a single piece. The works here range from the dense and propulsive to the airy and meditative. Settings of 2 poems by Emily Dickinson, both commissioned by Conspirare, bookend the program. The title work, Threshold of Night (setting one of Kathleen Raine's Three Poems of Incarnation), earned O'Regan the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters Award in the Liturgical category. Written for Advent and completed on the eve of the first annivesary of Hurricane Katrina, its blues-inflected harmonies echo that community's need for guidance in the wake of disaster.