Ravinia 2024 Issue 2

British choral singers hold the ancient British choral tradition very dear to their hearts. The six of us, and indeed The King’s Singers as a group, owe our career to this unbroken chain of choral training—normally in cathedrals and churches—which has produced beautiful music, great singing, and attuned musicianship over the course of almost a thousand years. But it’s important to remember that ours is not the only country to boast such a tradition. In this pro- gram, we turn our gaze northward, to an area of the globe where the natural world interweaves with historic singing traditions to create a body of extraordinary and atmospheric choral music. In mythology, the North represents the furthest edges of our knowledge and imagination. But it also represents great beauty, with no better example than the Northern Lights—or aurora borealis. Visible from much of Scandinavia, Ice- land, Baltic states, and sometimes Scotland, it is no coincidence that music written in the lands where it glows seems infused with its other- worldly magic. And, in this program, we focus on some of these lands: the Scandinavian coun- tries of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. After the celebratory folksong Bruremarsj fra Valsøyfjord (Wedding March from Valsøy- fjord) , we start our exploration of Norway with two “leading lights” of Norwegian choral com- position. From the 19th century we have ED- WARD GRIEG (1843–1907) , and from the present day, OLA GJEILO (b.1978) . Both com- posers capture something of the magic of the Norwegian landscape in the sound of their mu- sic through the use of wide-set, expansive chord spacings, which use the full range of the choral texture. Ola Gjeilo has become a remarkably popular voice in the modern choral world, tapping into the ideas of meditative contemplation to create a distinctive musical style. One of his most pop- ular works is Northern Lights , which he wrote after a commission from a US high school choir in 2008. It is a hymn to the aurora borealis and the feelings of beauty and terror which it has inspired in generations of mankind. The text is Ola Gjeilo the Latin prayer from the Song of Solomon , “Tota pulchra es amica mea.” Our associated charity, The King’s Singers Global Foundation, commis- sioned A dream within a dream from Gjeilo as part of the Foundation’s “New Music” initiative to bring beautiful new choral works into the canon. The piece is structured into three move- ments, each of which has an internal three-part structure, bound together with the central ques- tion of Edgar Allen Poe’s poem: “is all that we see, or seem, but a dream within a dream?” We premiered the work at London’s Wigmore Hall in November 2022. The 2022–23 concert season included many no- table musical anniversaries. These included 400 years since the deaths of William Byrd and Thomas Weelkes, 100 years since the birth of György Ligeti and the Walt Disney Corpora- tion, but also the 150th anniversary of the birth of HUGO ALFVÉN (1872–1960) . Though less well-known than some of his contemporaries, the Swedish composer’s music really captures the spirit, landscape, and folk melodies of his country. Alfvén was a conductor, a violinist, and also a painter during his life, but it is his expansive symphonies and folksong arrangements for which he is now best known. We are including two of his folk arrangements in our program: the pastoral, hymn-like Uti vår hage (In Our Meadow) , and Och jungfrun hon går i ringen (And the Maiden Joins the Ring) which is a comic—but also slightly sinister—folk song, in which Alfvén brings to life the sounds of gunfire as the story’s romance goes wrong. In between these two folk arrangements, we have Alfvén’s most famous choral work, Aftonen (Evening Song) . He wrote this in 1942, and it marked a deviation from his previous choral work which tended to be for low-voice ensembles. With the expanded range of full mixed choir, Alfven creates beautiful textures with the doubling of certain melodic moments between parts to cre- ate a thick, quasi-orchestral soundscape, which contrasts the hummed refrain that comes three times through the work. Hugo Alfvén In the summer of 2022, we found ourselves on tour in Auch in the south of France. In the audi- ence for our concert were the five members of The Real Group—Sweden’s premiere vocal en- semble and a fixture on the international a cap- pella scene for over 40 years. With them was their founding member and arranger, ANDERS EDENROTH (b.1963) . Many of Anders’s ar- rangements for The Real Group have become iconic, with their distinctive close-set jazz har- mony and virtuosic scat passages. We enjoyed chatting with them and comparing notes on our lives as touring groups and were inspired to cre- ate a “tribute” to them as part of this program. Two of the pieces we’ve included are traditional Swedish songs of which The Real Group have made definitive recordings: the romantic ballad Sa skimrande var aldrig havet (The Sea Was Never So Shimmering) and the hymn Som- marpsalm . The other two are compositions by Anders—the first on the theme of text and the second on the theme of music . This first piece, Words , explores the blessings and curses of words, and explores how language holds the key to every human interaction at all levels of society. Pass Me the Jazz imagines a dinner with friends, where the parallels between making music and enjoying food are explored through pun-drenched text and brain-melting harmony. Finland is a remarkable country with extraor- dinary geography and rich cultural history; despite its bitterly cold climate for much of the year, humans have inhabited the country for around 10,000 years. Its shape and size mean that its capital, Helsinki, is well-connected by land and sea to the Baltic states and the rest of Europe. But at the same time, Finland stretch- es 1,000km northwards into the remote and wild territory of Lapland, which is famous for its reindeer, sweeping forests, and, of course, Santa Claus. The Sámi style of folk singing from Lapland is the subject of light teasing by the contemporary Finnish composer JAAK- KO MÄNTYJÄRVI (b.1963) in his 1994 work Pseudo-Yoik . Mäntyjärvi studied as a Finnish/ English translator and then trained in choral Anders Edenroth RAVINIAMAGAZINE • JULY 1 – JULY 21, 2024 58 LILLIANANDERSEN(GJEILO)