Guest Artists: Jeremy Huw Williams and Ensemble Paramirabo

Welsh baritone Jeremy Huw Williams and Ensemble Paramirabo present the premiere of Horizon: Madog, a new chamber opera by Western Music faculty member Paul Frehner and librettist Angela J. Murphy. The program also features the premiere of Tynged yr laith (the Fate of the Language) by Welsh composer Claire Victoria Roberts, and works by William Mathias and Claude Vivier.

Synopsis: 
Horizon: Madog takes place in a distant future, when the world’s oceans have flooded coastal regions across the globe, and geomagnetic storms have decimated global communication systems, isolating the scant remaining survivors of societal collapse. Humanity is recovering but is still in a fragile state, and once-great nations are now fractured into island states. 

The piece explores the musings of Madog, who believes he is a descendant of the legendary Welsh prince ‘Madoc’ who purportedly reached North America centuries before Columbus. This tri-lingual (French, English and Welsh) Elder has been an instrumental founder of the fictional Île-Mont-qui-Tremble, a vibrant trilingual island community situated somewhere in what was ‘Quebec’. Madog and his now-deceased wife Élodie and their descendants are core founders of this ‘back-to-the-earth’ movement that have found a new Way, a mantra, for living in harmony with the environment. 

At the core of their ethos, nothing is created from objects that contribute to further pollution; everything is reused and re-usable. But, Madog’s roughewn “radio” has been transmitting news in Welsh that somewhere east, societies are re-developing. He fears that with the use of build-build-build technology, they will commit the same environmentally destructive errors and desecrate an already fragile-but-healing world. Seeing himself as a Messianic figure, he is making his final preparations before embarking on a solo perilous ocean journey by sailboat to find what remains of his ancestral homeland, and to spread his knowledge of the Way to those he encounters. 

Part of a multi-day residency, funding for which has been provided by the Don Wright Faculty of Music Undergraduate Gift Fund.

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