Eyes Shut. Musarc Winter Konsert 2025. Basford + Lang + Praetorius. 13 Dec 2025, 5–6pm or 7–8pm

EYES SHUT is a synaesthetic event by the experimental vocal ensemble Musarc. Taking the traditional festive concert as a point of departure, the ensemble explores ideas of time and ‘vision’ in a theatrical revery of music and light.

As the world wakes up to an array of devastating events globally, Musarc presents a meditation on beauty and hope, interleaved with reflections on loss and suffering. Metaphors of eyes opening and closing are of fundamental importance here. As we train our senses onto the horrors of our past, present and future, what insights can be gleaned and what distortions come to light? What does it mean to be critically receptive to past traumas, especially in a culture that privileges visual thought and experience? The arising, ‘hypnagogic’ state is reported to be an extremely creative one, though it is also home to vivid (multi-sensory) hallucinations and intense feelings of doubt and discomfort.

The programme opens around a renaissance performance of Daniel Basford’s Lo, how a rose, commissioned for Musarc in 2011. The work reimagines Es ist ein Ros entsprungen, a carol from the early 16th century commonly sung in a version by Michael Praetorius, featuring children’s percussion instruments and electronic echo and delay effects. The dormant winter rose holds both promise and uncertainty.

The event closes with a new staging of David Lang's Pulitzer Prize winning The Little Match Girl Passion (2007). This monumental work will be performed in entirety by the ensemble, drawing on the Musarc's unique range of practitioners, incorporating vocal and instrumental solos, movement and audiovisual interventions.