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Music that shimmers like a heat haze over the dust-dry deserts of Mexico.

Eric Whitacre describes Cloudburst as ‘a ceremonial, a celebration of the unleashed kinetic energy in all things’. The music stands as a metaphor for the ever-shifting nature of the universe, still elusive after centuries of theoretical science and experimental observation.

The piece was inspired by the sound and symbolism of Octavio Paz’s verse, extracted and adapted by the Whitacre from the Nobel Prize-winning poet’s El cántaro roto (The broken water-jar), and by the experience the composer had witnessing a desert cloudburst.

The performance comes complete with finger-snapping (all of the singers snap their fingers to simulate rain) – an old campfire game that Whitacre modified for the piece.