In Stillness, Peace traces a musical journey through different kinds of stillness and the ways peace can emerge from them. The programme brings together choral music that approaches stillness not as silence or withdrawal, but as an active state shaped by restraint, attention, balance, and trust.

The first half moves from clarity and simplicity towards deeper inward listening. Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus opens the programme with music of balance and transparency, where calm arises through proportion and flow. At the centre of the first half, Ēriks Ešenvalds’ Lux Aeterna invites quiet listening of a different kind, creating a sense of spaciousness in which light and stillness feel closely connected.

The second half is shaped around Michael John Trotta’s For a Breath of Ecstasy, a seven movement cycle for choir, string quartet, and oboe, setting poetry by Sara Teasdale. Written as a sequence of reflections, and heard here in its New Zealand premiere, the work traces fleeting moments of attentive calm and inward stillness, offering peace not as certainty or arrival, but as something brief, fragile, and deeply felt.

Performed in the resonant space of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, this midwinter programme invites listeners to experience how stillness can deepen, shift, and open into peace through sound.

Come and join the Bach Choir of Wellington for an invitation to stillness and peace on Saturday 25 July at 2pm at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart.