Calligrammes – the Swedish Radio choir meets Krista Audere

Eric Ericson Award winner Krista Audere makes her debut as principal guest conductor with the Radio Choir during this year’s edition of the Baltic Sea Festival. Together they offer a concert packed with some of the most interesting choral music of our time. In the work Calligrammes, the singers interact with specially built digital instruments, and then North Sea, written by the new rising star Alvin Vikman, is premiered.

Caroline Shaw – an art music it-girl

American Caroline Shaw is something of an it-girl in contemporary art music. After winning the Pulitzer Prize in music at the age of 30 for her choral work Partita for 8 voices, she has toured with Kanye West, premiered works at the BBC Proms and guest starred in the HBO series Mozart in the Jungle. With indirect inspiration from older forms, her compositions are always interesting, such as the string quartet Valencia, which paints the “architecture” of an orange, from juice to peel to pips.

Shaw’s upcoming production is a choral work titled How to fold the wind. She has taken inspiration from origami for the project, and with innovative vocal effects such as inhaled notes and wordless melodies, she folds individual voices into complex units. In Waves is a taste of this musical craftsmanship.

In memory of the victims of the Estonia

It has been over 30 years since the Estonia sank in the Baltic Sea. Just three years after the terrible event, Jaakko Mäntyjärvi wrote a work dedicated to the memory of its victims. The title means “Song of Maritime Disaster” and depicts the tragic September night of 1994.

The text of the work quotes three different sources: the Catholic funeral mass, a hymn and the news report about the disaster on Nuntii Latini – a Finnish radio program in Latin. Musical quotations also occur. The soprano solo hides the hymn Nearer, God, to you, which according to legend was the last song played by the Titanic’s orchestra. If you listen to the rhythm of the “anima eorum” section, you can hear how it imitates the way an SOS signal is sent in Morse code. Through this mixture of realism, sacred elements and sound effects, he creates a work that tells a story and touches.

World premiere of Alvin Vikman’s North Sea

Alvin Vikman (b. 2001) is a new star in the Swedish composers’ firmament. Despite his young age, Vikman has already collaborated with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Stockholm Cathedral Chamber Choir and the Erik Westberg Vocal Ensemble. For the Baltic Sea Festival, he has composed the work North Sea, which the Radio Choir will premiere at the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.

Vikman has a long-standing attraction to Japanese poetry. In 2024, the suite The Japanese Seasons was published, in which he set to music thousand-year-old poems taken from the anthology Hyakunin isshu. For North Sea, more modern poetry has been chosen, written by Nakahara Chūya (1907 – 1937). Chūya lived a short life between the two world wars, marked by personal losses. The grief is reflected in his poetry.

Nakahara Chūya writes about a violent sea whose waves are in eternal conflict with the dark sky – a meaningless conflict in which they curse each other’s existence.

“For me, the poem reflects powerlessness, a timeless feeling that not only characterized Chūya’s life, but many young people today who are thrown into a society filled with increasing uncertainty” – Alvin Vikman

Innovative choral work

In 2018, both the Berwaldhallen concert hall and the foyers were filled with the creations of the couple Åsa and Carl Unander-Scharin under the title Himmelsk mechatronik (heavenly mechatronics). Together with the artist Ludvig Elblaus, they had built interactive music installations that were exhibited for the audience and used by the Swedish Radio Choir on stage. Now there is a new chance to experience the innovative technology acting with the singers.

The choral suite Calligrammes takes its title and inspiration from the surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire, whose poems of the same name were printed typographically in the form of what the poem was about. Unander-Scharin has been inspired to transfer this visual representation into music. On stage, the Swedish Radio Choir has a series of motion-sensitive ropes, stretched like a human’s vocal cords. The ropes contain music, sound and voices, and by leaning against and pressing on these, the singers can play on the ropes. Quotes from Apollinaire’s verses are heard, which together with the singing and choreography by Åsa Unander-Scharin embody the surrealistic texts. The choir’s movements become part of the music, and the choir part of the instrument.

Text: Clara Mårtensson