VOCES8
After Silence
Featuring Penn State Concert Choir
Christopher Kiver, director

The “eight beautifully integrated solo voices” (BBC Music Magazine) of Britain’s VOCES8 return to Penn State to perform After Silence, a program inspired by and named after an essay by Aldous Huxley. Penn State Concert Choir, directed by Christopher Kiver, will join the octet in concert.

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music,” Huxley writes. The most significant constituents of our being, he observes, include our responses to beauty, pleasure, pain, ecstasy, and death.

The choral works in After Silence are exalted, vital, and freed from their original contextual restraints and are distinguishable by their inexhaustible capacity to express the inexpressible.

The a cappella program includes works by Arvo Pärt, Thomas Tallis, Benjamin Britten, Claudio Monteverdi, Mumford & Sons, Nat “King” Cole, and others. 

“The singing of VOCES8 is impeccable in its quality of tone and balance. They bring a new dimension to the word ‘ensemble’ with meticulous timing and tuning,” writes a critic for Gramophone.

Touring extensively throughout Europe, North America, and Asia, the ensemble performs a repertory from Renaissance polyphony to contemporary commissions and arrangements.

The Center for the Performing Arts previously presented VOCES8 in 2016 at Pasquerilla Spiritual Center.

Complimentary parking for this concert will be provided at Nittany Parking Deck. Patrons with Penn State parking permits will be able to park unassisted. Attendees without Penn State parking permits will need to get a coupon, and instructions on how to use it, from a parking attendant when entering the deck. Complimentary parking WILL NOT be available at Eisenhower Parking Deck. Shuttle service WILL NOT be provided.