Late Night Concert with the Swedish Radio Choir

Music with heart and intellect

The Swedish Radio Choir and their chorus master Marc Korovitch—who also serves as principal conductor of the Spanish Radio Choir—present a varied and atmospheric programme together with violist Ami-Louise Johnsson, who this season is in the spotlight as Classical Artist in P2. Johnsson, who first appeared on the Berwaldhallen stage at the age of eight, performs, among other works, two solo pieces during the concert.

The first of these is Hora lungă, which translates roughly as “slow dance” in Romanian. It is both the title of the opening movement of György Ligeti’s Sonata for Viola and the name of the folk style that inspired it. The entire movement is played on the viola’s lowest string, producing its deepest and warmest tone, which, combined with the melancholic melody, lends the music an intense emotional quality. Through subtle adjustments of certain intervals—so-called microtonal intervals—Ligeti connects to folk tradition while further enhancing the piece’s evocative character. This sense of suggestion is perfected in the closing sequence of rising harmonics, until only a trace of the music remains.

More than two hundred years earlier, in the late 1710s, Johann Sebastian Bach composed three sonatas and three partitas—two common Baroque genres—for solo violin. In Ligeti’s music, the soloist carries a single melodic line, whereas Bach—through double stops, open strings, and shifts between the instrument’s registers—creates polyphonic music for what is essentially a monophonic instrument. Bach’s slow movement, Largo, is inspired by dance music of his time and is at once unassuming in its simplicity and yet full of refined elegance.

For birth and in death

Ami-Louise Johnsson also performs with the Swedish Radio Choir in two works on the programme: Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo’s Serenity (O magnum mysterium) for choir and violin or cello, and English composer John Tavener’s Svyati for choir and cello. The viola’s range sits between the depths of the cello and the brightness of the violin, making it well suited to both works’ solo lines.

The text of Serenity, composed in 2012, reveals that it is essentially a piece for Christmas: “O magnum mysterium et admirabile sacramentum, ut animalia viderent Dominum natum iacentem in præsepio”—“O great mystery and wondrous sacrament, that the animals should see the newborn Lord lying in a manger”. The music itself is not overtly festive, however, but rather clearly reflects Ola Gjeilo’s own style: situated somewhere at the intersection of the formal simplicity of John Adams and the harmonic language of Eric Whitacre, infused with a touch of Scandinavian sensibility. The affinity with contemporary American composers is no coincidence—Gjeilo studied in New York and has long been based in the United States.

In Svyati, the string part never descends to the cello’s lowest register but instead rises upwards, where the viola’s lighter tone imparts a different kind of gentleness to the solo line. In his commentary on the work, John Tavener likened the cello part to the priest in a Russian Orthodox funeral service. The choir, in turn, represents the congregation accompanying the coffin as it is carried out of the church, almost as in a Greek drama. As a representation of Christ in the music, the solo part must be performed “in a manner deriving from Russian Orthodox liturgical chant”. The text is in Church Slavonic and is drawn from the Russian Orthodox liturgy.

In both works, the string part is often woven into the choral texture, at times merging completely with it. In a similar way, Gjeilo’s and Tavener’s compositions form two sides of the same coin within this programme: death and life in a continuous cycle, expressed in these works with the same sense of inward devotion.

Of love and forgiveness

The Italian composer Gregorio Allegri lived and worked in Rome during the first half of the seventeenth century, at the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque. Miserere mei, Deus for a cappella choir is his most famous work. It was written for performance during Holy Week in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican and, in keeping with its liturgical setting, in a style that was already archaic at the time: falsobordone, a method of harmonising plainchant that had been in use for several centuries. The text is Psalm 51, beginning with the words “Miserere mei, Deus”—“Have mercy upon me, O God”—and is sung alternately by three groups of singers: two performing polyphonic harmonies and a third delivering monophonic responses in plainchant. The same musical sequence recurs throughout the piece—the focus lies on conveying the message of the Biblical text to the congregation, to the listener. The youngest work in the concert is Alma redemptoris mater, written in 2010 by English composer Cecilia McDowall. Yet it too has one foot firmly in music history: it was commissioned by the early music ensemble The Marian Consort, which specialises in medieval and Renaissance repertoire as well as contemporary works. The “loving Mother of the Redeemer” invoked in the text is the Virgin Mary. The text dates from the eleventh century and is one of four Marian antiphons regularly performed in the liturgy. McDowall both imitates the ornamentation and harmonic style of early polyphony and enriches it with contemporary elements such as chromaticism and, at times, almost freely tonal harmonies. The result is not fragmented or stylistically uncertain, but rather a compelling and sonorous synthesis spanning nearly a thousand years of musical history.

Text: David Saulesco