Conceptualised around the commemoration of loss - of innocence, of friendships, of hope - Before Life and After is a concert that responds to a world irrevocably changed. Traversing from loss to light, it seeks to find a way forward by celebrating memory, and finding joy in the most unsuspecting of places.
Spanning almost a half-century of music, this concert features the songs of Francis Poulenc and Maurice Ravel, composed in the wake of the First World War; and Winter Words by Benjamin Britten set to the poems of Thomas Hardy. Each work harkens to a world that came before their time, transfiguring each composer’s nostalgia for an earlier world before the dawn of a new century into songs of yearning.
Before Life and After is performed by soprano Felicia Teo Kaixin, tenor Jonathan Charles Tay and pianist Jonathan Shin.