Swedish Choral Society, Vol. 10: Dixit - Vokalharmonin - Jennefelt, Thomas
Toimitusaika: Noin 7 - 14 arkipäivää
Jennefelt – Monteverdi – Rore – Tromboncino
Vokalharmonin
Musica Vitae – Mats Bergström
Fredrik Malmberg
"When approached by Fredrik Malmberg and asked if I would compose a setting of the 110th psalm Dixit Dominus for Vocal Harmony and Musica Vitae I felt hesitant at first. I found the psalm’s fundamental message of implacable violence in the face of dissident views repellent. My thoughts went immediately to the crusades and other wars in the name of religion. I discovered Pope Urban II’s speech to the Frenchmen of Clermont in the year 1095 that was to be the starting point of the crusades and the attempt to conquer Jerusalem. In my Dixit Dominus the choir move as an inciting demagogue from the pope’s instigation of rebellion towards Jerusalem, getting caught up on the way in Srebrenica, where eight thousand Muslim men were murdered in 1995, 900 years after the pope’s speech. A Bosnian woman sings to her dead sons in a song without words; a Lamento dedicated to the organisation Women in Black. I chose to replace the original Gloria from the end of the psalm with the words of the Kyrie “Lord have mercy”. My Dixit Dominus is a journey through time.
Certain texts become life-long friends. In the early 1980s I spent a summer in L’Isle-sur-Sorgue, a few kilometers from the vast springs at Fontaine de Vaucluse in Provence where Francesco Petrarca wrote the majority of his poems to Laura. A magical spot where crystal clear ice cold water flows out of the rock in a constant stream. I returned a few years later together with Magnus Florin to finish writing the music for a radio play that he had written about Petrarca and Laura. Barytone and string quartet. The suite of songs, settings of Petrarca poems, included a setting of Or che l’ciel et la terra. Twenty years on I was asked by Mats Bergström and Gustaf Sjökvist to compose a piece for them and the Bavarian Radio Choir in Munich. I chose to return to Petrarca’s Or che l’ciel et la terra.
It is the dualities in Petraraca’s poems I find enticing. Inner conflict versus outer tranquility. Death versus life. All symbolized in a portrayal of love and the absence of love. A fundamental source of much of my musical expression."
Thomas Jennefelt