A brand new work (straight out of the pandemic…) for choir written for individual singers, recording separately, and compiled later.

Complete info from Skylark:

“It’s a Long Way explores our collective experience of living through the 19 months since our last Skylark concert. It has been a time of great disruption, of isolation, of fear, and of loss, but also a time for reflection, for hope, for growth, and for action. While not arranged in a strictly chronological sense, the album explores a range of emotions we have experienced in 2020 and 2021. In addition to pieces arranged for choir, more than half a dozen Skylark singers are featured as soloists on an album that was recorded in a range of formats and formations over four months. Several extensive pieces were recorded by 24 individual Skylarks in isolation (at home, or alone in a studio), reflecting the impossibility of assembling our full nationwide roster during a pandemic. Like many of our programs, this album includes a variety of musical styles. Sometimes the mood swings between pieces are wide and jarring. We think of each piece as a window into an experience that one or more of us had in the last 19 months. Interspersed through the program are three sections of the Nunc Dimittis by Arvo Pärt, a foreboding but beautiful piece that seems to capture the emotions I have had related to the pandemic. It’s a Long Way includes four world premiere recordings: three were commissions by Skylark for the year 2020, and one is a re-discovered gem composed by Georges Dupuy de Mèry in the fall of 1942, during another time of global fear and upheaval. The album joyously culminates in a large group performance of a stunning setting of Psalm 91, titled My Soul Hath Found Refuge in Thee by American composer Evelyn Simpson Curenton.”