Solfeggio
During their summer school, the singers have been practicing scales: a way to start their singing day. In Solfeggio, Arvo Pärt uses the simplest ‘tune’ of all – a C major scale – in various unexpected ways, and does it so skilfully and witty that the outcome is a real story. The simply overwhelming choral music of Mendelssohn still shows us familiar harmonic panoramas, whereas Byrd brings us all the delights of Elizabethan sophistication. Clytus Gottwald uses the choir to create impressive symphonic structures in his masterly arrangement of one of Wagner’s well-loved Wesendonck Lieder.
With French exuberance, Daniel-Lesur builds a rich structure on a framework of clear and sonorous medieval chant in his version of Le Cantique des Cantiques (Song of Songs). Young Latvian composer Gundega Šmite uses elements such as colour, pulse and dynamics to create a multi-dimensional, vibrating sound space. The graphically notated Rondes, an example of ‘modern’ twentieth-century writing from the sixties still sounds fresh and spectacular. And Reger’s Nachtlied? What can we say, other than that it is just beautiful …
download the programme notes (as pdf booklet)
- Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), Die deutsche Liturgie
- William Byrd (c.1540-1623), Ave verum Corpus
- Gundega Šmite (1977), Light seeking light
- Arvo Pärt (1925), Solfeggio
- Richard Wagner (1813-1883) / arr. Gottwald, Im Treibhaus (from the Wesendonck Lieder)
- Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur (1908-2002), Le Cantique des Cantiques
- Max Reger (1873-1916), Nachtlied (from Acht geistliche Gesänge Op.138 : nr 3)
- Folke Rabe (1935), Rondes
Programme subject to change
