Evento

Wintersongs with Kitka - OAKLAND

"A refreshing spin on traditional seasonal choral music... thoroughly marvelous!"
- National Public Radio

Wintersongs is Kitka's critically-acclaimed and wildly popular winter holiday program showcasing seasonal music from a wide variety of Eastern European ethnic and spiritual traditions. For countless centuries, people around the world have utilized the power or community singing to infuse warmth, cheer, spirituality, wishes for peace, health, and good fortune into the long, dark, cold and difficult winter season. Eastern Europe's geographic position as a crossroads between Europe and the Orient has produced an astonishingly rich and varied array of seasonal musical rituals.

Each year, Kitka's WINTERSONGS concert is programmed around a different theme. WEATHERING THE STORM, Kitka's theme for 2019, will be the first in a series of "Vocal Ecology" concerts planned for the 2019-20 season. (Upcoming 2020 program themes include Forests, Fires, Waters, and Winged Creatures). These programs are designed to be an artistic response to urgent environmental topics impacting us all. Kitka's goal is to utilize the profound emotional impact of music to inspire concert attendees and workshop and community sing participants to become more actively engaged in the global struggle to reverse climate change.

WINTERSONGS: WEATHERING THE STORM program will feature songs with texts that speak to the powers of the elements in wintertime: blustering winds, storms, avalanches, rain, snow, ice, and floods. These musical selections will be balanced with winter ritual songs in traditional settings and original new arrangements designed to bring light and hope to communities who must bond together to survive the ravages of wintertime.

As Kitka's 2019 Wintersongs tour will take place entirely in California, our own homeland that is currently experiencing the terrible impacts of raging wildfires, we are also including a number of traditional rain calling songs in our program, one of which, Geshem, Geshem, is an original composition by Kitka's composer-in-residence, Janet Kutulas.