Musarc Winter Konsert 2025: EYES SHUT

Book tickets for Musarc’s Winter Konsert, Saturday 13 December 2025, 5–6pm and 7–8pm.
All tickets include a drink (mulled apple) and sweet and savoury snacks made by the choir.

Accessibility: the performance will be staged in the round, with half of the audience seated on the floor and the other half on chairs. If you require a seat, please arrive early and notify the team on entry, and we will ensure a choice of seats are available for you.

EYES SHUT is a synaesthetic event by the experimental vocal ensemble Musarc. Taking the traditional festive concert as a point of departure, the ensemble explores ideas of time and ‘vision’ in a theatrical revery of music and light.

As the world wakes up to an array of devastating events globally, Musarc presents a meditation on beauty and hope, interleaved with reflections on loss and suffering. Metaphors of eyes opening and closing are of fundamental importance here. As we train our senses onto the horrors of our past, present and future, what insights can be gleaned and what distortions come to light? What does it mean to be critically receptive to past traumas, especially in a culture that privileges visual thought and experience? The arising, ‘hypnagogic’ state is reported to be an extremely creative one, though it is also home to vivid (multi-sensory) hallucinations and intense feelings of doubt and discomfort.

The programme opens around a renaissance performance of Daniel Basford’s Lo, how a rose, commissioned for Musarc in 2011. The work reimagines Es ist ein Ros entsprungen, a carol from the early 16^th century commonly sung in a version by Michael Praetorius, featuring children’s percussion instruments and electronic echo and delay effects. The dormant winter rose holds both promise and uncertainty.

The event closes with a new staging of David Lang's Pulitzer Prize winning The Little Match Girl Passion (2007). This monumental work will be performed in entirety by the ensemble, drawing on Musarc's unique range of practitioners, incorporating vocal and instrumental solos, movement and audiovisual interventions.

What drew me to The Little Match Girl is that the strength of the story lies not in its plot but in the fact that all its parts—the horror and the beauty—are constantly suffused with their opposites. The girl’s bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories; her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness. There is a kind of naive equilibrium between suffering and hope.

David Lang, 2007