The Blue Hour

Tibetan Buddhists often meditate on bardo, a transitional state between life, death, and rebirth. The sense of hovering between the end and a new beginning runs through *The Blue Hour*, a cycle of 40 songs co-written by Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, Caroline Shaw, and Sarah Kirkland Snider for singer-songwriter Nova and A Far Cry, the Boston-based, self-conducted chamber orchestra. The work takes its lyrics from “On Earth,” a long poem by Carolyn Forché that recounts the thoughts of a dying woman and uses them to cultivate genuine feelings of universal empathy. Its miniature movements include heartfelt ballads, echoes of Bach and Abbess Hildegard (in Caroline Shaw’s mesmerizing *Firmament*), haunting laments, operatic cadenzas, punchy incantations, and much else, the whole proving greater than the sum of its considerable parts.