Based on Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s Twelve Canticles for the Zealot – a strangely beautiful and terrifying look into the minds of fanatics – Lansing’s Zealot Canticles is a concert-length choral ‘oratorio’ for clarinet, string quartet, and choir. Soyinka’s texts and Lansing’s responses are universal pleas for peace and tolerance, yet they force us to look into the mirror and recognize the thin line between devotion and intolerance, zealotry and radicalism. A major work on themes that dominate our public discourse every day.
