Midsummer Vilnius: Deep Field with orchestra & Bel Canto Choir Vilnius

The special performance of Bel Canto Choir Vilnius at Midsummer Vilnius festival. July 26, 2019 at the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania.

The festival’s closing event invited spectators to a memorable one in a lifetime concert experience – a fantastic journey of modern classical music by Eric Whitacre, the rock star of the global choral scene, Grammy winner, TED speaker, and one of the most famous composers and conductors of his generation.

The program was presented by Bel Canto Choir Vilnius (artistic director Egidijus Kaveckas) and the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra (with extended orchestral composition), conducted by Modestas Pitrėnas. The performance also featured impressive visual effects, enriching the concert experience at the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania.

The cornerstone of the concert was “Deep Field”, the composer’s grand opus for orchestra, choir and mobile app. Eric Whitacre wrote “Deep Field” after being inspired by photos of the same name from NASA’s Hubble space telescope, which captured the deepest view of the universe so far known to science.

The piece integrates a special Deep Field mobile app with the audience’s smartphones, which also became musical instruments thanks to the pre-downloaded app.

With “Deep Field”, Eric Whitacre combines the capabilities of classical and choral music with the latest technology, finding fascination in the synthesis of science and music, and boldly seeking to involve the audience in musical performances.

A second cornerstone of the concert was Eric Whitacre’s Godzilla Eats Las Vegas! The composer himself says the piece is “completely absurd” and presents it as a joke.

This playful and boisterous composition is like a mosaic of various audio sections, with contrasting and sometimes painfully familiar and characteristic musical details dropped together with seemingly no pattern other than the author’s own invented script. The piece features cries of panic, shouts, mambo and tango rhythms seeming to come from nowhere and small musical quotations from Frank Sinatra, Wayne Newton and even Tchaikovsky.

To portray Godzilla’s fantastical story, Eric Whitacre uses about 30 different styles of music, instantly changing between them and thus creating the hectic mood of Godzilla’s visit to the American “Sin City”.