This 2008 release from Southwest Chamber Music and Cambria Master Recordings features music of Grawemeyer Award-winning composer Chinary Ung. The recording includes Aura, Oracle and Still Life After Death. Sopranos Elissa Johnston, Kathleen Roland and Grammy Award-winning members of Southwest Chamber Music are featured in this dazzling recording. Commissioned by Southwest Chamber Music former Board President Susan Bienkowski and her husband Wang Chung Lee, Aura is a major 45-minute work celebrating the enlightenment of Buddha. At its Southwest Chamber Music world premiere in February of 2006, Aura was described by the Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed with sweeping accolades: \"with music this enthralling, there is no need to hold back. Musically, Aura unfolds like radiating light.\" Oracle is inspired from the autobiography of the His Holiness. His Holiness asked his oracle if he should remain in Tibet or leave, and the oracle responded that he should depart. This work is therefore an apt metaphor to Ung\'s exile in the United States during the Khmer Rouge genocide. Still Life After Death is a small theatre work and was inspired by an ancient Cambodian ritual, traditionally taking place on someone\'s deathbed. This piece grew out of a collaboration between The New Performance Group and composer Chinary Ung. This recording was the result of a historic collaboration between Southwest Chamber Music and composer Chinary Ung, which began in 2003. Southwest Chamber Music is very proud to have toured to Cambodia and Vietnam in December 2006, bringing the first professional performances of Chinary Ung’s music to Southeast Asia. Ung left Cambodia as a student in 1964, was in involuntary exile during the Khmer Rouge era, and returned to Cambodia for the first time in 2002 after 38 years in the United States. The first two works Ung composed since his return to Cambodia in December of 2002 are Oracle and Aura. Southwest Chamber Music’s performances of Oracle and Aura represented the most significant musical activity in Cambodia since the end of the Khmer Rouge Era.