Night Voyager (Ela Orleans) world premiere

In 2024, Ela Orleans performed at our Musical Utopias festival, where she played an early version of her work Night Voyager. A new version of this work now premieres during November Music in Den Bosch. Together with Saskia, Joey and Pete from Ensemble Klang, Orleans has revamped and reworked her piece into an entirely new work. The starting point remains the legendary space mission in 1969 that took humans to the moon for the first time.

Images of the infamous Apollo mission from the NASA archives are used live to tell  the story of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts. Young’s nine-part poem cycle was written in 1740 and is a meditation on death. In its time, Young’s monumental poem was described as “the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced .”

Ela Orleans wrote an impressive soundtrack for synthesizer, theremin, and violin, among other instruments. As a composer and multi-instrumentalist, Orleans moves between many musical genres.