On a sun-drenched Sunday afternoon in The Hague, while others headed for the coast, a quiet crowd gathered at Amare. Composer and conductor Eric Whitacre opened the performance by reciting the first lines of William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence — the same words that inspired his latest work, Eternity in an Hour:
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
He thanked the audience, gently amused, for choosing a concert hall over the beach. And then, for one hour, time stopped.
I attend concerts often. I am always searching for something new — a spark, a shift, a moment of intensity. But it is rare to lose all sense of myself, to be transported so fully elsewhere. That is what happened during Eternity in an Hour. Whitacre’s composition, performed by the Vlaams Radiokoor with cellist Amy Norrington, pianist Koenraad Sterckx, and live electronics conducted by Whitacre himself, created a space of deep stillness and connection.
Everything was prepared down to the last detail, yet the effort of the artists felt weightless. The choir’s voices flowed like breath; the cello’s phrases moved between fragility and force; the piano pulsed gently beneath it all. The electronic layer was more than an effect — it breathed with the music, shimmering, expanding, vanishing.
At some point during the performance, I felt tears rising. It was a quiet, physical reaction — one I could not quite explain. Later, I thought of Leonard Bernstein’s words — that some feelings are so deep, so special, that we have no words for them. That is where music becomes so marvelous: it expresses the inexpressible, not in words, but in sound and movement.
Listening, I watched the choir, imagined their discipline, the breath control, the focus. I felt the pianist’s anticipation waiting for Whitacre’s signal, and I followed the cellist’s every bow stroke. These musicians did not perform at us — they invited us to feel with them. And I did. Intensely.
Eric Whitacre is one of today’s most performed choral composers. He has received a Grammy Award and is known for his pioneering Virtual Choir project. In recent years, he also collaborated with Hans Zimmer on the film score for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Eternity in an Hour is his latest large-scale work — a meditation on presence, time, and awe.
I stepped out of Amare changed. The city itself had not shifted — but something in me had. I moved more quietly through the streets, as if gliding across a calm, wide inner sea, while the people around me drifted like distant ships, carried gently within it. Carmen Bulz 12th May 2025
