Anna Lapwood conducts Eric Whitacre's Seal Lullaby - Pembroke College Girls' Choir

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Eric Whitacre's Seal Lullaby, introduced here by one of our youngest choristers, Mia Arana Tagle. The Seal Lullaby is another one of our lockdown pieces. The girls were encouraged to request repertoire for us to look at in our remote rehearsals when we couldn’t meet in person, and this was one of the pieces they chose. It quickly became a choir favourite. Whitacre described how this piece started its life as a song for an animated film based on Rudyard Kipling’s The White Seal, which begins with a mother seal singing softly to her young pup. The film never happened in the end, but the piece was already written, and Whitacre describes how he sang it to his baby son every night to try and get him to go to sleep. The piece now exists in several different configurations for multiple different voice parts, but I’m particularly fond of this version for upper voices. There is something about the slight fragility and innocence of young voices which I find incredibly moving when combined with Kipling’s text.