Night Watch: Romantic Choral Music from Vienna

While the world sleeps, weary sailors and restless lovers keep vigil through the night.

Led by Grammy-winning conductor Paul Hillier, Ireland’s national chamber choir explores the beauty and tranquillity of the nocturnal world in a programme of Romantic choral music from Vienna.

In Brahms’ Fünf Gesänge (Op. 104), night watchmen blow their horns in the distance, lamps are extinguished confidently, and a wakeful soul asks the night to carry his love sighing back to him.

In Schubert’s Sehnsucht, a lover searches the sky and longs for their distant beloved, and in his Gesang der Geister über den Wassern, the stars admire themselves in a glassy lake.

In Hugo Wolf’s six Geistliche Lieder (Holy Songs), a soul rests like a harboured ship while the world sleeps, darkness climbs softly from the hills, and a lone sailor sings across the still night.

At the centre of the programme, Ligeti’s iconic Lux Aeterna illuminates the night with eternal light in an avant-garde work made famous by Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.