The Eternal Earth (SPHERE Festival)

Ottawa Tourism offers 50 free tickets for SPHERE festival concert at the NAC. First come first serve! 
The Eternal Earth – Thursday Sept 22, 8pm
Vivaldi’s Four Seasons seen on the 21^st century lense
Info: c.nac.ca/Eternal
Tickets: (CODE – EARTH)  https://am.ticketmaster.com/nac/en/ism/TjJPMDkyMg==?promoCode=RUFSVEg=

From September 22 to 25, join the NAC Orchestra for SPHERE, a four-day festival launching a year-long exploration of listening as humankind navigates the climate crisis and biodiversity loss on planet Earth.

In SPHERE, the NAC Orchestra joins forces with Canadian, Indigenous, and Nordic composers, musicians, visual artists, writers, and scientists for a multidisciplinary conversation about the sphere we call home. Performances, talks, visual and audio arts, and sensory installations offer a response to the environmental crisis through the intersection of art, creativity, and science.

To hear German-British composer Max Richter’s Recomposed Four Seasons is to be swept up in the passionate urgency of nature, its mysteries and joys and the delicate persistence of the seasons on our planet. In this remarkable work, Vivaldi has spoken and Richter has answered with ferocious love for the robust but increasingly precarious nature of life on Earth. A passionate champion of contemporary work, Norwegian violinist Mari Samuelsen makes her Canadian debut in this performance. 

In the festival’s opening concert, Indigenous mezzo-soprano Marion Newman makes her return to Southam Hall to perform selections from Outi Tarkiainen’s The Earth, Spring’s Daughter, a song cycle for mezzo and orchestra based on Sami poetry. Outi Tarkiainen is a Finnish composer of “rare moral conviction and geographical attachment” (gramophone.co.uk).
Her captivating work, The Earth, Spring’s Daughter, is set in the language of the Sámi people, the reindeer-herding communities of northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland—and the last remaining Indigenous people in Europe. Like the Earth itself, “the music unfolds in layers and cycles, to be born again and again,” says Tarkiainen. The work hints at what the Earth might have to tell us if we will listen