Flea Circus at Tivoli

While so much choral music exploits the wonderful harmonies that result from blending voices together effectively, Avshalomov’s “Flea Circus at Tivoli”—in keeping with the non-linear aspects of his wife Doris’s poem which it sets—eschews these niceties and revels in the wonderful sonic chaos that can result from having a bunch of people singing, speaking, and in other ways conveying a text at the same time but not together.

—FJO