The Sacred Veil - a project led by Eric Whitacre and Charles Anthony Silvestri - was created following the passing of Charles’ wife, Julia in 2005. It represents a journey towards the answer for many questions, including whether departed loved ones are truly gone, and how can we mourn those we have lost whilst still moving forward? In Charles’ own words, the project became “a significant part of my journey toward healing and wholeness after great loss.”

Poet, author, composer, and speaker Charles Anthony Silvestri has worked with other artists from all over the world to create texts tailor-made for their commissions and specific artistic needs. He enjoys the challenge of solving these creative problems and has provided custom choral texts, opera libretti, program notes and other writing for composers including Eric Whitacre, Ola Gjeilo, Kim Arnesen, and Dan Forrest, and for ensembles ranging from high schools to the Houston Grand Opera, from the King’s Singers to the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, from Westminster Choir College to Westminster Abbey.

Grammy® Award-winning composer and conductor Eric Whitacre is one of the world’s most performed living composers. His works have been programmed worldwide by millions of amateur and professional performers, while his ground-breaking Virtual Choirs have united singers from over 120 different countries. Eric, a graduate of the prestigious Juilliard School of Music, is presently Artist in Residence with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, following five years as Composer in Residence at the University of Cambridge, UK.As conductor of the Eric Whitacre Singers, he has released such chart-topping albums including Light and Gold and Water Night. In high demand as guest conductor, he has drawn capacity audiences to concerts with the Netherlands Radio Choir, London Symphony Orchestra, Flemish Radio Choir, and Minnesota Orchestra.

REVIEWS

The Sacred Veil is notable simply as one of the most deeply personal pieces of concert music heard in quite some time. Yet there is more to its profound effect than this. Whitacre responds to the texts with a sober language akin to but quite distinct from his usual style, something like the dark language cultivated by Renaissance composers for the requiem mass and other serious texts. The performances by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, under Whitacre's direction, are superb, and the sound, from California's Musco Center for the Arts, is exemplary.

– AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

Composer Eric Whitacre and poet Charles Anthony Silvestri, longtime collaborators and close friends, come together for their most personal and expansive work to date. Whitacre has created a powerful score for Silvestri’s heartfelt poetry in the 12-movement work The Sacred Veil. Silvestri’s wife, Julie, died of ovarian cancer at age 36 in 2005, leaving two young children. His texts, written collaboratively with Whitacre, and the intimate, compelling score tell a story of courtship, love, loss, and the search for solace. Whitacre leads the Los Angeles Master Chorale in the world-premiere recording.

– WFMT-FM (Lisa Flynn)

The Mozartists continue their MOZART 250 project of staging operas by Mozart and his contemporaries with their recording of the UK premiére of Niccolò Jommelli’s Il Vologeso, first performed over 250 years ago on 11 February 1766 for the Stuttgart court in Ludwigsburg. For this eagerly awaited performance The Mozartists assembled a superb young cast, headed by the Irish mezzo-soprano Rachel Kelly, a graduate of the Royal Opera’s Jette Parker Young Artist Programme, tenor Stuart Jackson, a former Mozartists Associate Artist, and soprano Gemma Lois Summerfield, winner of the 2015 Kathleen Ferrier Award. Jommelli was born just north of Naples in 1714 (the same year as Gluck) and died there in 1774. Largely forgotten now, he was one of the most celebrated composers of his day, and during a career which spanned thirty-seven years he wrote some eighty operas as well as a great number of sacred works. He was seen as an important and progressive composer in combining the vocal melodiousness and lyricism of Italian opera with more elaborate and dramatically charged elements of French opera. Set in Ephesus, on the western extremes of the Parthian Empire, in c.164 AD, Il Vologeso centres on Berenice, a woman who becomes caught between two men – the victorious Roman general Lucio Vero, and Vologeso, King of the Parthians (thought dead, but recently returned after his defeat battle). The Mozartists, under the dynamic leadership of conductor and artistic director Ian Page, are leading exponents of the music of Mozart and his contemporaries. Originally called Classical Opera, the company was founded in 1997, and has received widespread international acclaim for its stylish and virtuosic period-instrument orchestra, its imaginative and innovative programming, and its ability to nurture and develop world-class young artists.

Drawing international media attention following their founding in 2014, the Girls’ Choir of Canterbury Cathedral have quickly become leading lights in the British choral music landscape. For their first recording with Signum – led by their director David Newsholme – they draw on the rich catalogue of what have become British cathedral anthems from the 16th Century to the 20th, performing works by composers including Tallis, Byrd, Stanford, Parry and Howells. They are joined on this recording by the Men of Canterbury Cathedral choir, as well as organists Aidan Bawtree and Nicholas Wearne. Canterbury Cathedral’s Girls’ Choir, formed in 2014, sings at Evensong in the Cathedral twice every month, frequently with the lay clerks. The majority of the girls attend local schools in Canterbury and they rehearse each Wednesday evening. Their first performance at Evensong, on the occasion of the feast of the Conversion of St Paul, in January, was attended by more than 600 people and widely covered by the international press.