Description: The Lost Birds is a musical memorial to bird species driven to extinction by humankind. Sweeping and elegaic, it's a haunting tribute to those soaring flocks that once filled our skies, but whose songs have since been silenced. It's a celebration of their feathered beauty: their symbolism as messengers of hope, peace, and renewal. But it's also a warning about our own tenuous existence on the planet: that the fate that befell those once soaring flocks foreshadows our own extinction.
Description: “The Saddest Noise” is a setting of Emily Dickinson's poem “The Saddest Noise, the Sweetest Noise.” It begins the story of The Lost Birds in spring: the season of birth and renewal, and a time of year when bird songs flood the skies. But what is ordinarily a joyous sound is now riddled with sorrow, as the songs of the remaining birds remind us of the ones we've already lost.
Description: To Shiver the Sky is an oratorio about the history of flight, and mankind's quest to conquer the heavens. Told through the words of 11 of our greatest astronomers, inventors, visionaries and pilots, it charts our relentless need to explore the universe, defy our earthly bonds, reach for the face of God, and ultimately claim our place among the stars. It is sung in English, Latin, Italian, German, French, Polish, Russian, and Sanskrit. This is the sixth movement of the work entitled, “To the Stars”.
Description: “Wild Swans,” a setting of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, ends the first half of The Lost Birds. Told from the point of view of the poet, it starts with the sound of bird cries: gradually approaching from a distance, until they pass overhead, triggering feelings of longing. After an instrumental interlude and the narrator's impassioned declaration of freedom, the song ends as it started--with the cries of wild swans receding into the distance, foreshadowing their demise.
