** 17May 2025 | 8:00pm | Plymouth United Church of Christ | 1217 6^th  Avenue | Seattle                         (livestream option available for Saturday concert - see website) THIS SUNDAY 18*May 2025 | 7:00pm | Christ Episcopal Church | 310 North K Street | Tacoma *** Tickets at _http://www.theesoterics.org/next_ Hello music fans, arts enthusiasts, hopeless romantics and adventurers all! This May, The Esoterics will celebrate Spring with the choral music of New York composer Martha Sullivan. Sullivan is a founding soprano of C4 (The Choral Composer Conductor Collective) in Manhattan, and teaches music theory, musicianship, and composition at Rutgers University. This fully /a cappella/ repertoire presents a collection of compositions featuring adventure, magic, mischief, romance, hope, anguish, joy, loss, longing – and of course, */dragons/*. The centerpiece of the program will feature /Epithalamion/, Martha’s *setting of verse from Edmund Spenser’s wedding ode* - 24 stanzas to depict each hour of their wedding day in honor of his bride, Elizabeth. Sullivan sets five of these stanzas that focus on the delights and distractions of the wedding night. This cycle, originally commissioned and premiered by The Esoterics in 2009, is replete with the elegance of Elizabethan England. Following this are *settings from Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare –* each depicting moods and metaphors on themes of love, lament and longing; the desire to create and the frustration with indifference. Then comes */Madrigals of Nostradamus/**– four French quatrains by the celebrated soothsayer* that predict secret letters, bowing unicorns, embezzling nephews, haunted houses and naked queens. This cycle will be followed by Martha’s setting of *“The new Colossus” by Emma Lazarus*– the same sonnet of welcome that is cast in bronze and mounted at the base of the Statue of Liberty. To finish the program, The Esoterics will premiere *Sullivan’s six-movement cycle entitled **/Certain dragons/*. For this work, Martha penned a poem of her own and curated five others – by Keats, Sassoon, Yeats, Lazarus and Longfellow – all on the theme of dragons. In these six songs, we will celebrate the legendary creatures and their extraordinary nature: volatile, violent and virtuous; fiery, fearless and fierce. *This is MODERN music: The composer WILL be in attendance to answer all questions at end of concert.* Please join us for this celebration of lavish literature and sumptuous song! // // /Each Esoterics project is a distinctive and unrepeatable experience, // //both for performers and our audience-community. // //This project is no exception, so treat yourself to an evening // //that will leave you enchanted, delighted and enriched./// General admission ticket prices are $25 at the door ($20 in advance). Discounted admission ticket prices are $20 at the door ($15 in advance) for students, seniors, the un(der)employed, and the differently-abled. Active singers in other choral groups may also attend for $15. Advance tickets are available online at _www.TheEsoterics.org/next _ <https://theesoterics.org/next> The Esoterics’ SEASON 32 has been sponsored with generous support from: 4Culture  |  The Aaron Copland Fund for Music  |  The Ann Stookey Fund for New Music ArtsFund  |  ArtsWA  |  The BMI Foundation |  Classic KING-FM  |  The Horizons Foundation The Jeffrey Cotton Fund for Music | Live Music Project | /and/  Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture** Now in its 32^nd  season, Seattle’s most innovative chorus has drawn international praise for performing rarely-heard compositions of contemporary music for unaccompanied voices, for infusing elements of the literary, theatrical, and visual arts into the typical concert experience, and for performing settings of poetry, philosophy, and spiritual writings from around the world. Since its founding in 1993, The Esoterics has performed more than 500 concerts throughout the Pacific Northwest, has commissioned and premiered more than 250 new works for /a cappella/ voices in dozens of languages, and has mastered the most virtuosic choral compositions of the last century. The Esoterics has released twenty-one CD recordings – several which have been favorably reviewed in /The Gramophone/ and /American Record Guide. /The ensemble has toured to England, Ireland, Wales, Finland, Spain, and Portugal, and has been featured in the BBC Radio program “The Choir.”