Fall 2009 — Northern Lights

Allegra Martin, Director

Sunday, December 6, 2009 at 3 PM

This fall’s program is called “Northern Lights,” and it reflects our new music director's deep admiration for the Scandanavian choral traditions. We will be singing compositions from Norway, Sweden, and Finland, along with one piece from England and one from Russia. Pieces include:

Laudate Dominum by Hovland

Ved Rundarne (“From Rundarne”) by Grieg

Hosanna by Nystedt

Six Women’s Choruses by Rachmaninoff

The Snow by Elgar

Vesi Vasyy Lumen Alle (“Water Under Snow is Weary”) by Wessman

Lauluja Merelta (“Songs from the Sea”) by Sallinen

“Suite” de Lorca by Rautavaara (text by Federico García Lorca)

Across the Bridge of Hope by Sandström (in English)

First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church
630 Massachusetts Avenue
(corner of Mass Ave and Route 60)
Arlington Center, MA
(This venue is handicapped accessible)

Tickets | Directions

Program Notes

Singing choral music is an important and popular endeavor in Scandinavia.  The Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland have a higher average participation rate for choral groups than any other nations on the planet.  By one estimate, ten percent of the population of Sweden sings in a choir.  Such a number of choirs creates a demand for new music, and the result is that there are many excellent contemporary Scandinavian composers writing for all of these choirs.  I have for some time had a deep interest in new music, and as I explored the contemporary choral repertoire, it was hard to miss the fact that so many great new works for choirs were coming out of Scandinavia.  So I decided for my first concert with Cantilena to take a trip up north!

We start our evening in Norway with a piece by Egil Hovland, born in 1924.  In addition to his composition studies in Oslo and Copenhagen, he studied at Tanglewood with Copland and in Florence with Luigi Dallapiccola.  He has composed in various styles for various ensembles, including symphonic works and chamber music; he is especially noted for his sacred music and has composed numerous works for both choirs and for the organ.  His “Laudate Dominum,” composed in 1976 for three-part women’s choir, is a wonderfully dramatic work, alternating very strong declamatory statements by all the voices together with short phrases that enter in canon and have the effect of piling up on each other.

Knut Nystedt’s “Hosanna” bears certain resemblances to Hovland’s piece, although the tone is much lighter and more effervescent.  Hovland took little pieces of melody and piled them on top of each other in canon; Nystedt takes many little pieces of melody and continually rearranges them, moving them into different keys, making them shorter, or rearranging their order. He also shared a teacher with Hovland, namely Copland. Nystedt was born ten years before Hovland, in 1915, in nearby Oslo.  He is the founder of the Norwegian Soloist's choir and conducted it for 40 years; he also taught choral conducting at the University of Oslo for 20 years.

Between these two living masters we have a piece by the most famous of all of Norway’s composers, Edvard Grieg.  Born in 1843, Grieg is the oldest composer on our program.  He is known as a nationalist composer and drew heavily on the folk music of Norway for his inspiration, which you will hear in today’s piece.  Although he is primarily known for his symphonic music and his piano music (his Piano Concerto is a great favorite) his choral music is also exquisite.  Tonight’s piece, Ved Rundarne, was originally a song from a set Grieg wrote called "Twelve Songs to Poems by A.O. Vinje."  Grieg himself arranged it for the "Hanchens Damekor" in Bergen, Norway in 1888. 

One of the two non-Scandinavian composers on our program, Rachmaninoff was born in north-western Russia in 1873.  His “Six Choruses for Women’s Voices” (Op. 15) are his first published choral work.  About three years after his graduation from the Moscow Conservatory, he took a post teaching at the Maryinksy Ladies School and wrote these pieces for the school choir over a period of several months.  We will be singing four of the six, all of which deal with vividly illustrated scenes from nature.  They all have a melancholy tinge, and since this is Rachmaninoff, of course the piano accompaniment is exquisite!

Edward Elgar, born in 1857, was the preeminent British composer of his day.  He is known best for the Enigma Variations, the choral-orchestral work The Dream of Gerontius, and the “Pomp and Circumstance” march. “The Snow” (Op. 26, No. 1) was dedicated to Mrs. E. B. Fitton of Malvern, a fine pianist who frequently played with Elgar in local musical events.  It is one of a set of two, the other being the song “Fly, Singing Bird.”  The poetry for both songs is written by Elgar’s wife Alice, who was a published author of poetry and fiction, and the poem is a romantic Victorian plea for keeping the soul pure.  This piece, with its soaring violin duet and long lush lines, is a classic of the women’s choral repertoire.

To pair with Elgar’s song about snow, we have a more modern piece on snow by Finnish composer Harri Wessman, born in 1949.  As a child, he was a member of the renowned Tapiola Children’s Choir.  Years later, he composed this piece for them.  Wessman’s piece is based on an old Kalevala tune.  The Kalevala is an epic poem compiled from Finnish folklore, and is one of the most important works of Finnish literature.  In the days of oral verse tradition, these folk poems would have been sung to certain melodies, not spoken. Wessman bases his piece on one of these melodies, a tune that would be very familiar to most Finns. The poet, Eha Lättemäe, is an Estonian poet born in 1922, who wrote in both Estonian (often in the Tarvastu dialect) and Finnish.  She lived through the Soviet occupation of Estonia, and taught herself Finnish through finding and listening to Finnish news programs on her radio. 

In a lecture in Buenos Aires in 1933, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca put forth his beliefs about artistic creation and performance, and argued that “great art depends upon a vivid awareness of death, connection with a nation's soil, and an acknowledgment of the limitations of reason.”  There can hardly be a better quote to sum up the four poems we will be singing.  The poems, which describe eerie and vivid scenes about lonely roads, echoing screams, chilly visions of the moon, and above all, death, are that much creepier when you consider that Lorca was murdered in his 30’s in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.  And the sinister, colorful texts are wonderful matched by Einojuhani Rautavaara’s unsettling music.  Rautavaara, born in 1928, is one of the most well-known Finnish composers, and after studying at the Sibelius Academy, he came to New York to study at Juilliard with Persichetti.  While in the U.S., he too studied with Copland at Tanglewood (like Hovland and Nystedt.)  He is known for his symphonic works, and he is currently at work on an opera based on the texts of Lorca.   

Aulis Sallinen, born in 1935, is another well-known contemporary Finnish composer, in the same generation as Rautavaara.  In addition to his symphonic works, he is also known for his six operas.  Like “Water Under Snow is Weary,” his “Lauluja mereltä,” or “Songs from the Sea,” was written for the Tapiola Children’s Choir.  Three of the four songs are traditional Finnish poems about the sea’s power to claim lives, but the text of the second movement, “Shipshape,” was written by the composer’s two songs Markus and Taneli.

Our final piece of the concert has a rather heart-breaking story attached to it. Jan Sandström (b. 1954) was born in the far north of Sweden, but grew up in Stockholm.  Like the other composers on our concert, he has written for a variety of forces, but he is particularly known for his orchestral and vocal music.  The poem he has set, “Across the Bridge of Hope,” was written by 12-year-old Shaun McLaughlin with five friends in Northern Ireland in 1998, and it won a national contest.  Shortly after, Shaun died in the Omagh bombing in 1998, which killed 29 people.  The poem expresses the desire for peace for all people, and Sandström has dedicated it to the world-wide project “Choral Singing for Peace and Justice.” 

One final note!  In addition to an overwhelming number of wonderful composers, there is also an overwhelming number of exquisite professional choruses in Scandinavia, including but not limited to the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir, the Swedish Radio Choir, the Danish National Radio Choir, Grex Vocalis (Norway), the Philomela Female Choir (Finland), the Tapiola Chamber Choir (Finland), and the Tapiola Children’s Choir (Finland).  I encourage all lovers of choral music to explore these groups.