By Cayman Compass contributor Christopher Tobutt
The evening began the way Cayman’s best musical nights often do – with people greeting one another like family. The Harquail Theatre has a way of gathering people into a single, warm circle, and on this night, that sense of belonging became the quiet overture to ‘Dawn & Awakening’ programme performed by the Cayman National Choir and Orchestra.
The musical evening on 13 March also featured appearances by the Young Voices, a group of young singers carefully selected from their local school choirs; Caryn Caffarelli, the talented professional singer from Chicago who now resides on Grand Cayman; and Denys Carbó Cedeño and the Jazz en Trance Big Band.
With the Cayman National Orchestra’s rendition of Richard Strauss’ ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’, the room shifted. That deep, elemental rumble felt like the island itself taking a breath as the brass rose, bright and inevitable. A sunrise in sound, it was the moment the audience leaned forward together, ready to travel.
Caffarelli’s voice in ‘Ordinary Miracle’ shimmered with sincerity. The choir supporting her with a warmth that made the song feel like a shared blessing. ‘Morning Has Broken’ followed with a gentle, pastoral glow – familiar, yes, but refreshed by the choir and orchestra’s tender and precise phrasing, as though the hymn had been washed clean overnight.
Then came the bright, unmistakable lift of ‘Here Comes the Sun’. The orchestra carried George Harrison’s melody with a kind of smiling precision: It offered the sound of winter – a metaphor for the coldness of people’s hearts – finally loosening its grip, as the sun comes out to shine, thaw and warm.
The Young Voices – a part of the choir that has been practicing in several of Cayman’s secondary schools – brought new strands of quiet, reflective joy. In ‘Awake My Soul’ and later in John Rutter’s ‘Look at the World’, their clear tones lit the theatre from within. Pride rippled through the audience – teachers glowing, parents sitting taller, strangers smiling at the sheer purity of it. Their presence made the theme of awakening more literal: the next generation stepping confidently into the light.
The orchestra’s darker colours emerged in Joshua Reznicow’s ‘Leviathan Rising’, a plunge into deep waters and ancient shadows. Yet even this felt part of the day’s journey – the reminder that awakening is not always gentle and that dawn inevitably follows a long night. From there, Sarah Quartel’s ‘Wide Open Spaces’ opened the horizon again, its serene expansiveness like standing on a ridge and breathing in the world.
Caffarelli returned for ‘Skylark’, her voice floating effortlessly above the choir and orchestra, a moment of pure, suspended beauty. Z. Randall Stroope’s ‘Omnia Sol’ followed with glowing sincerity – a piece about carrying light forward and about the people who shape us.
‘Feeling Good’, with Carbó Cedeño and the Jazz en Trance Big Band, lit up the room. Those swaggering big bass notes anticipated the song’s raw audacity – a new day, a new dawn, told in a bold, brassy and unapologetically joyful way. It brought the evening to an end than with a definitive anthem of new beginnings.
Dawn & Awakening was more than a concert; it was a gathering of Cayman’s musical family, a shared sunrise, a reminder that when this community comes together with music at its centre, something bright and hopeful usually rises.
Christopher Tobutt is a freelance journalist who has written for various publications in the Cayman Islands since 2003.
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